SDL VS imgui

Compare SDL vs imgui and see what are their differences.

SDL

DEPRECATED: Official development moved to GitHub (by spurious)

imgui

Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies (by ocornut)
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SDL imgui
9 351
394 55,717
- -
4.8 9.7
about 3 years ago about 15 hours ago
C C++
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

SDL

Posts with mentions or reviews of SDL. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-27.
  • Ask HN: What is the SDL.h file in SuperTux?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Feb 2024
    I don't know for sure, but could it be this?

    https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL

  • How to choose a front end / control kit pairing for multi cabinet?
    1 project | /r/cade | 1 Apr 2023
    The kit has been fun. My daughter loved helping me wire it up to a dummy box, and we decided its worth moving forward with a desktop cabinet build. I don't have a raspberry pi and can't find one, so we're using a 2012 mac mini. OpenEmu has been fun, but I'd like to be able to control the whole UI with the joystick, so we looked at EmulationStation-DE (retropie for desktop as its been explained to me). The control kit worked with OpenEmu but not EmulationStation, and the folks over in that sub said its not supported by SDL https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL
  • Do i have enpugh knowledge to learn new libraries?
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 8 Sep 2022
    There is also SDL, which is a bit of a behemoth library, but gives you a lot of firepower if you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of building something from scratch with media. It provides a framework for working with graphics, sound, input hardware, etc., and is cross-platform. I haven't personally used SDL but it's a pretty well-utilized library. It's written in C so the same caveats apply as before, but works just fine with C++.
  • Fixing Stutters in Papers Please on Linux
    2 projects | /r/linux_gaming | 2 Jan 2022
    This has already been fixed in the latest SDL version, but it's likely that the game comes bundled with it's own version.
  • I'm giving out microgrants to open source projects for the third year in a row! Brag about your projects here so I can see them, big or small!
    103 projects | /r/programming | 28 Dec 2021
    I got tired of writing C# bindings code by hand to interop with native C/C++ libraries, so I automated the process. Example for SDL: https://github.com/bottlenoselabs/SDL-cs. The repository is automated daily using Dependabot to run C2CS, generate the P/Invoke code, and push a Git commit with the code automatically when there is a change to https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL.
  • Updated MacOS documentation
    1 project | /r/MacOS | 9 Nov 2021
    The source code for it can be found at https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL , this may be helpful if your looking for an example of how a 'platform layer' like this it can be implemented.
  • The Very First Post
    11 projects | dev.to | 10 Sep 2021
    Simple Directmedia Layer: a library that offers low-level access to resources like audio, video graphics, joystick, keyboard, mouse. It is mainly used for the development of video games (Stepmania and Valve's games such as Counter Strike: Source, as some examples).
  • AM2R @ Raspberry Pi - Take 3
    2 projects | /r/AM2R | 2 Sep 2021
    Now, we'll need to source the latest SDL source tarball. You can find it [here](https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL), but you can source the latest as of this writing with the command below. Run cd, and then run:
  • Good Open Source Projects?
    3 projects | /r/C_Programming | 30 May 2021
    Game library: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL

imgui

Posts with mentions or reviews of imgui. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-06.
  • Using raylib with Dear ImGui: Game Dev Debugging UI
    5 projects | dev.to | 6 Apr 2024
    include(cmake/CPM.cmake) function(raylib_imgui_setup_dependencies) message(STATUS "Include Dear ImGui") FetchContent_Declare( ImGui GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/ocornut/imgui GIT_TAG 277ae93c41314ba5f4c7444f37c4319cdf07e8cf) # v1.90.4 FetchContent_MakeAvailable(ImGui) FetchContent_GetProperties(ImGui SOURCE_DIR IMGUI_DIR) add_library( imgui STATIC ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui.cpp ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui_draw.cpp ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui_widgets.cpp ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui_tables.cpp) target_include_directories(imgui INTERFACE ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}) include(cmake/CPM.cmake) message(STATUS "Include dbg-macro") cpmaddpackage( "gh:sharkdp/dbg-macro#fb9976f410f8b29105818b20278cd0be0e853fe8" )# v0.5.1 message(STATUS "Include fmtlib") cpmaddpackage("gh:fmtlib/fmt#e69e5f977d458f2650bb346dadf2ad30c5320281" )# 10.x message(STATUS "Include raylib") cpmaddpackage("gh:raysan5/raylib#ae50bfa2cc569c0f8d5bc4315d39db64005b1b0" )# v5.0 message(STATUS "Include spdlog") cpmaddpackage("gh:gabime/spdlog#7c02e204c92545f869e2f04edaab1f19fe8b19fd" )# v1.13.0 message(STATUS "Include rlImGui") FetchContent_Declare( rlImGui GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/raylib-extras/rlImGui GIT_TAG d765c1ef3d37cf939f88aaa272a59a2713d654c9) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(rlImGui) FetchContent_GetProperties(rlImGui SOURCE_DIR RLIMGUI_DIR) add_library(rlimgui STATIC ${rlimgui_SOURCE_DIR}/rlImgui.cpp) target_link_libraries(rlimgui PRIVATE imgui raylib) target_include_directories(rlimgui INTERFACE ${rlimgui_SOURCE_DIR}) endfunction()
  • Ask HN: Fastest cross-platform GUI stack/strategy
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Mar 2024
  • Immediate Mode GUI Programming
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    Immediate mode is a fuzzy concept, as witnessed by this writeup: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/About-the-IMGUI-paradi...
  • Nebula is an open-source and free-to-use modern C++ game engine
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jan 2024
  • Black Triangles
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    It's fun to see the evolution in e.g. these examples of image loading for Dear Imgui:

    https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Image-Loading-and-Disp...

    DirectX9 will even load the image for you, DirectX11 okay we get a few more structures to fill out, DirectX12 is where it goes off the rails and we are filling out a bunch of UNKNOWN DONT_CARE JUST_DO_IT. Then of course Vulkan is the one that gets the big fat "this probably won't actually work for you" warning.

    I understand whats happening, but you know sometimes I just want to display a fucking image.

  • Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface with minimal dependencies
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2023
    ImGui is engine/GPU agnostic

    Themeing isn't a just a retained mode thing, you can do wonders with immediate UIs, even thought (dear)ImGui doesn't provide much, you can still do wonders: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/issues/707#issuecomment-362...

    More on that topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1qyvQsjK5Y

  • Where do I start to learn C++ for a game development
    2 projects | /r/gamedev | 10 Dec 2023
    Bonus: If you want to make desktop app with UI, then this is another great C++ library and it's also simple to learn as well. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui.
  • GUI library for fast prototyping
    3 projects | /r/rust | 6 Dec 2023
    AFAIK the Rust equivalent to C++'s Dear ImGui is egui.
  • Stretching myself thin with Dear ImGui projects
    2 projects | dev.to | 28 Nov 2023
    They use a Dear ImGui, a C++ GUI library.
  • PCSX2 Disables Wayland Support
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2023
    Aside from bugs and driver issues, Wayland has some unfortunate design limitations. For example, Dear ImGui multi-viewports don't work because "Wayland doesn't let application read or write windows positions."

    https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Multi-Viewports

    This is a feature available on Windows, macOS, and of course X11. Making choices like this means desktop Linux becomes even more of a weird island that nobody wants to support.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing SDL and imgui you can also consider the following projects:

SFML - Simple and Fast Multimedia Library

wxWidgets - Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library

ssr-proxy-js - A Server-Side Rendering Proxy focused on customization and flexibility!

nuklear - A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library

GStreamer - GStreamer open-source multimedia framework

NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL

mpv - 🎥 Command line video player

GTK+ - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk

libVLC

egui - egui: an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI in Rust that runs on both web and native

QtAv - A cross-platform multimedia framework based on Qt and FFmpeg. 基于Qt和FFmpeg的跨平台高性能音视频播放框架. Recommand to use new sdk https://github.com/wang-bin/mdk-sdk

CEGUI