giu VS winlamb

[https://github.com/allendang/giu

I prefer giu + zenity for tooling GUIs with either very few or very many elements (i.e. 100's). I use Flutter for when I want an attractive GUI of medium complexity.

FYI, they're using Dear ImGui. Either https://github.com/AllenDang/giu or https://github.com/inkyblackness/imgui-go

I did poke around for a bit, but I really needed the tool, and I knew it would be days of work if I learned a new tool and hours if I stuck with what I knew.

My coworker Andrew did start a similar tool, which is here: https://github.com/andrewpmartinez/grid and uses https://github.com/AllenDang/giu for the UI.

Next time I need a feature I probably take a look at that and see what the model looks like and and how straightforward it is to work with.

To maintain my another GUI lib giu (https://github.com/AllenDang/giu), I used to update imgui manually time to time, and it always a pain in my ass.

I then used GIU (https://github.com/AllenDang/giu) which is a Go wrapper around IMGUI - I found major performance issues since my requirements are pretty extreme, I was plotting charts containing 1000's of points and the overhead of calling the underlying C libraries from Go was too much.

The first thing that came into my mind was: why not simply go fully native, with the aid of something like WinLamb? Often you can roll your own custom controls quicker than a cross-platform library.

With WinLamb it's trivial: just create a field in the class.

However, if you still want to go Win32, this library is a thin wrapper which may save you a lot of time (and sanity). However, it's C++, not C.

I write C++ and raw Win32 for more than 20 years. I'm the author of this, and I'm rewriting my personal stuff in Rust just for fun.

I wrote a very thin C++11 wrapper for Win32 a few years ago, in case you're interested: WinLamb. It won't do everything, it just covers window creation and messaging, and leaves room to plug any other Win32 stuff on top of it.

Take a look at WinLamb source if you want to see how to build a native GUI.

Given my C++ Win32 background, the very first thing I tried was to write a native Win32 GUI app in Rust. It later became the WinSafe crate, which is strikingly similar to WinLamb C++ lib. The Rust experience was awesome. The correctness of the type system was something I really appreciated, things C++ cannot give you.

I write native Windows stuff sometimes, and I use Windigo, which I wrote based on my WinLamb C++ lib. It's a GUI system over raw Win32, so this has the disadvantage that you'll have to learn some Win32... but it has the advantage that you have the unleashed power of Win32 at your fingertips.