A framework to allow GopherJS code (or really any JavaScript-based language) running in various JavaScript contexts to create and accept IPC connections (Unix domain sockets and Windows named pipes).

The purpose of this project is to allow for the creation of mobile or desktop applications using web technologies for their user interface with a more powerful backend engine that might be shared across platforms. Existing solutions are either underpowered (Cordova et al.) or massive in size because they distribute an entire Chromium browser (NW.js, Electron, et al.). The proliferation of high-performance web view components on all platforms, combined with JavaScript bridge APIs, opens up exiting possibilities for more nimble and high-performance applications.

The current implementation supports the following platforms/components:

• OS X
  • WebView
  • WKWebView
  • JSContext
• iOS
  • WKWebView
  • JSContext
• Windows
  • System.Windows.Forms.WebBrowser

In my benchmarking, roundtrip IPC time across the JavaScript -> host -> IPC bridge is ~10 ms, which is plenty fast for long-running asynchronous operations or fast synchronous operations. There's a lot of efficiency lost vs pure Go IPC, but there's probably still some low hanging optimization to be done on the GopherJS side of the bridge. JavaScript is just such a terrible language.

Current development entails polishing and optimizing the GopherJS side of things. I may also remove the GopherJS dependency entirely, although this is not a priority because the size penalty is not huge for desktop or mobile and Go is so much better to write in than JavaScript.

If Go's shared or static library support picks up on all platforms, I may also just write a unified host IPC bridge interface (currently the POSIX one is written in C++ and the Windows one is written in C#).

I'm also happy to accept contributions for Android or Linux support, or other Windows web view components. WinRT in particular would be nice, though the sandboxing restrictions may put the whammy on any IPC.

You'll first need to clone the library into your GOPATH. Probably best to do this manually, because the POSIX IPC implementation uses asio, including it as a Git submodule that you'll need to init/update.

If you check out the code to your GOPATH, you should be able to build and run the demo applications for OS X and Windows present in the "examples" directory. These examples also show how to use the library. The API is in now way stable and will almost certainly change as time goes on.