imgui
sciter
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imgui
- Ask HN: Fastest cross-platform GUI stack/strategy
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Immediate Mode GUI Programming
Immediate mode is a fuzzy concept, as witnessed by this writeup: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/About-the-IMGUI-paradi...
The Dear ImGui readme is a good starting point:
https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
...now of course Dear ImGui is a specific implementation of an immediate mode UI framework, but it's also the most popular implementation.
- Nebula is an open-source and free-to-use modern C++ game engine
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Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface with minimal dependencies
From the faq https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#q-w...
Q. What is this library called?
This library is called Dear ImGui. Please refer to it as Dear ImGui (not ImGui, not IMGUI).
(The library misleadingly started its life in 2014 as "ImGui" due to the fact that I didn't give it a proper name when I released 1.0, and had no particular expectation that it would take off. However, the term IMGUI (immediate-mode graphical user interface) was coined before and is being used in variety of other situations e.g. Unity uses it own implementation of the IMGUI paradigm. To reduce the ambiguity without affecting existing code bases, I have decided in December 2015 a fully qualified name "Dear ImGui" for this library.
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
My first guess would be it is supposed to sound like "Dear Imogen". However, it wasn't initially conceived of as a reference to anything. The "Dear" was tacked on to qualify the name [1].
[1] https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#q-w...
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Where do I start to learn C++ for a game development
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.
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GUI library for fast prototyping
AFAIK the Rust equivalent to C++'s Dear ImGui is egui.
sciter
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Show HN: Dropflow, a CSS layout engine for node or <canvas>
> wondering if css and svg could be used as abstraction over graphics and UI libraries
There's another project called Sciter that uses CSS to target native graphics libraries: https://sciter.com
> I wonder how hard it was to implement css. I've heard it can be pretty complex.
It was hard, but the biggest barrier is the obscurity of the knowledge.
Text layout is the hardest, because working with glyphs and iterating them in reverse for RTL is brain-breaking. And line wrapping gets really complicated. It's also the most obscure because nobody has written down everything you need to know in one place. After I finished block layout early on, I had to stop for a couple of years (only working a few hours a week though) and learn all of the ins, outs, dos, and don'ts around shaping and itemizing text. A lot of that I learned by reading Pango's [1] source code, and a lot I pieced together from Google searches.
But other than that, the W3C specifications cover almost everything. The CSS2 standard [2] is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. It's internally consistent, concise, and obviously the result of years of deliberation, trial and error. (CSS3 is great, but CSS2 is the bedrock for everything).
- Ask HN: Fastest cross-platform GUI stack/strategy
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Immediate Mode GUI Programming
otherwise, if we have only retained mode as in browsers, we will need to modify the DOM heavily and create temporary elements for handles.
- This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond
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Rusty revenant Servo returns to render once more
I've still never used it but I've long been curious about Sciter:
- Ode to the M1
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So you want to write a GUI framework (2021)
These bullet points are exactly what I did in Sciter (https://sciter.com)
- Windowing
-- Tabs
-- Menus
-- Painting
-- Animation
-- Text
-The compositor
-Handling input
-- Pointer input
-- Keyboard input
- Accessibility
- Internationalization and localization
- Cross-platform APIs
- The web view
- Native look and feel
On top of that DOM and CSS implementations to achieve declarative UI. And JS as a languuage behind UI - declarative in some sense way of defining UI behavior.
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Servo, the parallel browser engine written in Rust
I'm not sure if it can support all the libraries but yes it can be used to make desktop apps. Theres also Sciter.
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Digital Audio Workstation Front End Development Struggles
I agree web stuff is really the best way to develop UIs. Good luck making responsive stuff in C++ for example. The paradigm of HTML, CSS, and JS is extremely powerful and even allows you to use canvas, webgpu, wasm.
There are multiple commercial projects that use web dev paradigm for GUIs:
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RePalm
I did UI part of it.
Up until last year my Sciter ( https://sciter.com ) worked on WinCE.
Dropped support after my last customer that was using WinCE decided to drop support of that OS.
WinCE had pretty solid and stable core runtime and API. Graphics was limited by GDI (no antialiasing and alpha channel) but that was the only major problem.
What are some alternatives?
wxWidgets - Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library
nuklear - A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library
NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL
GTK+ - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk
egui - egui: an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI in Rust that runs on both web and native
CEGUI
FLTK - FLTK - Fast Light Tool Kit - https://github.com/fltk/fltk - cross platform GUI development
nana - a modern C++ GUI library
nuklear
webview - Tiny cross-platform webview library for C/C++. Uses WebKit (GTK/Cocoa) and Edge WebView2 (Windows).
raylib - A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming
WPF - WPF is a .NET Core UI framework for building Windows desktop applications.