Terminal Emulation - Fun with a Go GUI
Part of my effort to maintain the Data General 32-bit minicomputer legacy has included writing free, open-source terminal emulators for the DASHER-series character terminals. I now have three such emulators: DasherQ - written in C++ and Qt - the original, maintained; DasherJ - written in Java and JavaFX - kinda deprecated; DasherG - written in Go using the Go-GTK GUI package - the latest incarnation. Although functionally very similar (all provide serial and telnet access, DASHER commands, and DASHER function key handling), each has its pros and cons. DasherQ relies on the Qt library, which is truly multi-platform and it runs just fine on Windows, Raspbian and many desktop Linuxes. The drawbacks (from my point of view) are code complexity and keeping up with changes in Qt - twice in the relatively short lifetime of DasherQ it has suffered bit-rot due to changes in Qt. As I delve deeper into Go I also find that I am less inclined to maintain C++ code. DasherJ was really