Vecty is a library for building responsive and dynamic web frontends in Go instead of in JavaScript, HTML & CSS. It competes with modern web frameworks like React & VueJS, and supports compilation to both WebAssembly and vanilla JavaScript.

Benefits

• Go developers can be competitive frontend developers.
• Share Go code between your frontend & backend.
• Reusability by sharing components via Go packages so that others can simply import them.

Goals

• Simple
  • Designed from the ground up to be easily mastered by newcomers (like Go).
• Performant
  • Efficient & understandable performance, small bundle sizes, same performance as raw JS/HTML/CSS.
• Composable
  • Nest components to form your entire user interface, seperating them logically as you would any normal Go package.
• Designed for Go (implicit)
  • Written from the ground up asking the question "What is the best way to solve this problem in Go?", not simply asking "How do we translate $POPULAR_LIBRARY to Go?"

Features

• Compiles to WebAssembly (via standard Go compiler) and vanilla JavaScript (via GopherJS).
• Small bundle sizes: 0.5 MB hello world (see section below).
• Fast expectation-based browser DOM diffing ('virtual DOM', but less resource usage).

Current Status

Vecty is currently considered to be an experimental work-in-progress. Prior to widespread production use, we must meet our v1.0.0 milestone goals, which are being completed slowly and steadily as contributors have time (Vecty is over 4 years in the making!).

Early adopters may make use of it for real applications today as long as they are understanding and accepting of the fact that:

• APIs will change (maybe extensively).
• A number of important things are not ready:
  • Extensive documentation, examples and tutorials
  • URL-based component routing
  • Ready-to-use component libraries (e.g. material UI)
  • Server-side rendering
  • And more, see milestone: v1.0.0
• The scope of Vecty is only ~80% defined currently.
• There are a number of important open issues.

For a list of projects currently using Vecty, see the doc/projects-using-vecty.md file.

Small bundle sizes

Vecty uses extremely minimal dependencies and prides itself on producing very small bundle sizes (mostly limited by the compiler), making it suitable for modern web development:

Example	Compiler	Bundle size	Compressed (gzip)
hellovecty	Go + WebAssembly	2.3 MB	0.5 MB
markdown	Go + WebAssembly	4.2 MB	0.9 MB
todomvc	Go + WebAssembly	3.4 MB	0.7 MB
hellovecty	GopherJS	0.5 MB	0.1 MB
markdown	GopherJS	2.6 MB	0.4 MB
todomvc	GopherJS	1.7 MB	0.3 MB

Community

• Join us in the #gopherjs and #vecty channels on the Gophers Slack!

Changelog

See the doc/CHANGELOG.md file.