Hacker News Clone

sosodevJul 24, 2026, 8:45 PM

GSX seems interesting but I don’t understand why it depends on the node ecosystem. I just want to use Go for everything.

jackieliiJul 24, 2026, 10:17 PM

because Vite is great. It only uses it in dev. In prod, no node involved. Try the gsx init. You'll know why. The dev experience you'll want.

EDIT: highlights are:

- live reload: it only reloads after new binary is built. also has /healthz check integration. I believe this is better than air, wgo etc

- dev panel & error overlay: see generate, build status: on syntax error, you get an error overlay explaining where the error is;

- status for slow builds: if you're working in a big project, you can see the building progress & log in the dev overlay

SamInTheShellJul 25, 2026, 4:48 AM

I'm kinda in the camp of wanting nothing to do with node if I'm building in Go. We have our own stdlibs for serving.

pjmlpJul 25, 2026, 11:59 AM

I am on the Java/.NET camp for the most part, however I do share the sentiment.

throw1234567891Jul 25, 2026, 11:42 AM

I’m in the other camp. I switched to node backends from go because of vite.

indemnityJul 25, 2026, 4:51 AM

Same, hard pass on remote shell as a service that is Node and its ecosystem.

jackieliiJul 25, 2026, 10:10 AM

I'm not sure I follow. Node is not on the production path

evilduckJul 25, 2026, 2:45 PM

It's easy to follow, it's a knee jerk tribalism reaction and not a logical or informed one. Go attracts backend or anti-frontend people so anything intermingling the two will draw out the commenters who bemoan anything that realistically builds a modern website. Just ignore it, your choice for dev tooling is practical and makes sense to me.

saurabhmudradiJul 25, 2026, 7:07 AM

Cool! was looking for go based frontend options for local data heavy dashboard usecase, this seems perfect.

nzoschkeJul 26, 2026, 2:09 AM

Thanks for the explanation. I do find air lacking for sufficiently complicated applications servers

nzoschkeJul 24, 2026, 9:00 PM

How does this compare to templ and templui? I see from the docs that gsx is templ compatible.

And why does this depend on node / npx? Something to do with the JSX syntax and parsing?

I wish go std templates were more ergonomic for components.

Past that I wish projects like templ or GSX have a simple go generate pipeline, and support html and text/markdown output including whitespace.

Until then I have a Frankenstein of a bunch of templating.

jackieliiJul 24, 2026, 10:18 PM

It doesn't depend on node for runtime. Only for dev: the vite dev server, and js bundling, nothing else.

Also I've been a long time templ & html/template user, also used templui. gsx is born out of my ergonomics desire from templ. gsxui is similar to templui, but makes bundling possible. Also borrowed pipeline filters from html/template. But you're right, this does involve a _build_ step. But I think it's worth it.

Later I'll add the bundler free version. But really, vite has been so useful. Just treat it as another tool.

hopppJul 25, 2026, 6:36 PM

A GSX + Wails combo sounds interesting for developing desktop apps fully in Go

gen3Jul 24, 2026, 8:37 PM

Looks good. I normally package a webui up with vite and serve that but I'll keep this in mind

jackieliiJul 24, 2026, 10:22 PM

Yep, exactly, you can also do code splitting by adding multiple entry points. https://github.com/gsxhq/vite does the heavy lifting

skontraandrijaJul 24, 2026, 9:43 PM

does it work with htmx?

jackieliiJul 24, 2026, 10:23 PM

Absolutely. I already ported my production app - enterprise customer to it. I use it with https://github.com/jackielii/structpages/

Gsxui – Shadcn-style components for Go

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