Love Gnome, love Gtk... But damn do I hate Vala. Esp that it compiles to C and you get to debug both

I wish that JS/Go/C were where they ended up as the languages for the platform.

There are nice Gtk bindings for Go, give it a try. Feels quite native.

How is the cross platform compilation story with these bindings?

I haven't tried that. I have ran the same Go-Gtk program on Linux and Mac, but recompiled on both systems.

I like that this goes straight into more advanced topics after doing the basic “Hello world” thing. One suggestion: once you ended up with three copies of that label I was thinking that’s a good opportunity to do some property binding, which is an extremely useful feature.

> For the purpose of the demonstration, we're going to use Gtk.Grid to create a grid container widget.

why exactly? a GtkBox is would do just fine, looks better and it's easier to handle programmatically than the grid.

No specific reason. I just pick Grid and continue with it.

Thats a lot of code to write "Hello world".

Most (all?) GUI frameworks are indeed frameworks, and require a bit of ceremony.