Moans like Electron in Go

Today marks the release of Wails v2. It's been about 18 months since the first v2 alpha and about a year since the first beta. I am really grateful to everyone who participated in the evolution of the project.

Part of the reason it took so long was due to wanting to come to a definition of completeness before officially calling it v2. The truth is, there's never a perfect time to tag a release - there's always pending issues or "just one more feature" to integrate. What marking an imperfect major release does, however, is provide some stability for users of the project, as well as a small reset for developers.

This release is more than I expected. I hope it gives you as much pleasure as it gave us developing it.

If you're not familiar with Wails, it's a project that allows Go programmers to provide rich interfaces for their Go programs using familiar web technologies. It is a lightweight Go alternative to Electron. Much more information can be found on the official website.

Version v2 represents a huge leap forward for the project, as it resolves many weak points of v1. If you haven't read any of the macOS, Windows, or Linux beta blog posts, I encourage you to do so as it covers all the major changes in more detail. In summary:

Webview2 component for Windows that supports modern web standards and debugging capabilities. Dark/Light theme + custom theme on Windows. Windows now has no CGO requirement. Out-of-the-box support for Svelte, Vue, React, Preact, Lit, and Vanilla project templates. Vite integration providing a hot reload development environment for your application. Native application menus and dialogs. Native window translucency effects for Windows and macOS. Support for mica and acrylic backdrops. Easily generate an NSIS installer for Windows deployments. A rich runtime library providing utility methods for manipulating windows, events, dialogs, menus, and logging. Support for obfuscating your application using garble. Support for compressing your application using UPX. Automatic Typescript generation of Go structs. More info here. No additional libraries or DLLs should ship with your application. For any platform. No obligation to pool front-end resources. Simply develop your application like any other web application.

Upgrading to v2 was a huge effort. There have been around 2.2K commits by 89 contributors between the initial alpha and today's release, and many, many more providing translations, testing, feedback and help on the forums of discussion as well as follow-up on issues. I am incredibly grateful to each of you. I would also like to give special thanks to all the project sponsors who provided guidance, advice and feedback. Everything you do is greatly appreciated.

There are a few people I'd like to give a special mention to:

First of all, a huge thank you to @stffabi who provided so many contributions that we all benefit from, as well as support on many issues. It provided some key features such as external dev server support which transformed our dev mode offering by allowing us to connect to Vite's superpowers. I...