libui
stb
libui | stb | |
---|---|---|
22 | 164 | |
10,631 | 25,128 | |
- | - | |
0.0 | 6.4 | |
almost 2 years ago | 2 days ago | |
C | C | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
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libui
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Short history of all Windows UI frameworks and libraries
You can kind of see the desktop UI train wreck in real time here.
We started with simple stable APIs for a common look and feel. For a while these were evolved and made available in other languages. This was back when native apps were consistent and intuitive and you could… uhh… actually write and ship them without bundling giant runtimes or checking a huge compatibility matrix.
Then around 2012 the train rounds the bend and screeeeech it hits some bad track and starts to derail. UI starts trying to emulate the web, a terrible UI platform, and sane compositional UI libraries and APIs are abandoned in favor of XML soup.
Since this stuff is a trash fire, this is followed by multiple incompatible attempts to replace or fix this. Most of these are abandoned dead ends.
Meanwhile the dev community just said fuck it and went to Electron, creating today’s world where a “hello world” app with an OK button is hundreds of megabytes and has to load an entire private copy of a language runtime and rendering engine.
Versions of this comedy of errors have occurred on every other platform, and of course there has been little effort to create a cross platform UI API that’s sane beyond Qt (with its own problems) and dozens of half completed OSS projects.
So enjoy Electron I guess.
There was one sane human being who tried to do this a while ago:
https://github.com/andlabs/libui
It’s the only sane desktop UI project I’ve seen in almost 20 years, an attempt to create an actual cross platform common API. But it’s abandoned of course, likely too difficult for one dev and nobody is going to provide financial support for anything that sane.
Maybe AI will get good enough some day that we can use it to do a thing like that.
- BeeWare Toga v0.4.0 – A Python native, OS native GUI toolkit
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Is there no simple GUI library for pure C?
What about https://github.com/andlabs/libui
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Capy – Cross-platform library for making true native GUIs in Zig
Fantastic! This is similar to the C library `libui` since it also acts as a wrapper of native libraries of each platform.
If only there was a way to interface to these using some declarative minimal and highly opinionated programming language and paradigm...
https://github.com/andlabs/libui
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Mathematical Patterns
For the GUI you will need a library or framework that interacts with your specifiv operating system and allows you to create windows and a canvas to which you can draw. You could give libui a chance.
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libui-ng-sys: external FFI bindings for libui-ng
libui-ng is a cross-platform GUI library with native widgets written in C. It is based on an earlier, (currently) inactive project known as libui. While Rust bindings for libui have existed for years (see ui-sys and iui), there is no solution for the new libui-ng; libui-ng-sys aims to fill this role.
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What GUI library should I start with after learning C?
libui
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Not-gtk GUI Libs/frameworks for plain C
https://github.com/andlabs/libui is very nice, but unfortunately dead, if it serves your purpose consider using it, this is a fork under development https://github.com/libui-ng/libui-ng
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Ask HN: Is there any cross platform non native GUI written in C that looks good?
https://github.com/andlabs/libui
Better yet, it has excellent DSLs that make it possible to build desktop apps in a way similar to HTML, but much better due to keeping all code dynamic in one language (no static/dynamic multi-language separation/mixing dissonance):
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Usable cross-platform GUI?
Maybe a module that uses https://github.com/andlabs/libui or a light HTML renderer?
stb
- Lessons learned about how to make a header-file library (2013)
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Nebula is an open-source and free-to-use modern C++ game engine
Have you considered not using an engine at all, in favor of libraries? There are many amazing libraries I've used for game development - all in C/C++ - that you can piece together:
* General: [stb](https://github.com/nothings/stb)
- STB: Single-file public domain libraries for C/C++
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Writing a TrueType font renderer
Great to see more accessible references on font internals. I have dabbled on this a bit last year and managed to have a parser and render the points of a glyph's contour (I stopped before Bezier and shape filling stuff). I still have not considered hinting, so it's nice that it's covered. What helped me was an article from the Handmade Network [1] and the source of stb_truetype [2] (also used in Dear ImGUI).
[1] https://handmade.network/forums/articles/t/7330-implementing....
[2] https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_truetype.h
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Capturing the WebGPU Ecosystem
So I read through the materials on mesh shaders and work graphs and looked at sample code. These won't really work (see below). As I implied previously, it's best to research/discuss these sort of matters with professional graphics programmers who have experience actually using the technologies under consideration.
So for the sake of future web searchers who discover this thread: there are only two proven ways to efficiently draw thousands of unique textures of different sizes with a single draw call that are actually used by experienced graphics programmers in production code as of 2023.
Proven method #1: Pack these thousands of textures into a texture atlas.
Proven method #2: Use bindless resources, which is still fairly bleeding edge, and will require fallback to atlases if targeting the PC instead of only high end console (Xbox Series S|X...).
Mesh shaders by themselves won't work: These have similar texture access limitations to the old geometry/tessellation stage they improve upon. A limited, fixed number of textures still must be bound before each draw call (say, 16 or 32 textures, not 1000s), unless bindless resources are used. So mesh shaders must be used with an atlas or with bindless resources.
Work graphs by themselves won't work: This feature is bleeding edge shader model 6.8 whereas bindless resources are SM 6.6. (Xbox Series X|S might top out at SM 6.7, I can't find an authoritative answer.) It looks like work graphs might only work well on nVidia GPUs and won't work well on Intel GPUs anytime soon (but, again, I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this authoritatively). Furthermore, this feature may have a hard dependency on using bindless to begin with. That is, I can't tell if one is allowed to execute a work graph that binds and unbinds individual texture resources. And if one could do such a thing, it would certainly be slower than using bindless. The cost of bindless is paid "up front" when the textures are uploaded.
Some programmers use Texture2DArray/GL_TEXTURE_2D_ARRAY as an alternative to atlases but two limitations are (1) the max array length (e.g. GL_MAX_ARRAY_TEXTURE_LAYERS) might only be 256 (e.g. for OpenGL 3.0), (2) all textures must be the same size.
Finally, for the sake of any web searcher who lands on this thread in the years to come, to pack an atlas well a good packing algorithm is needed. It's harder to pack triangles than rectangles but triangles use atlas memory more efficiently and a good triangle packing will outperform the fancy new bindless rendering. Some open source starting points for packing:
https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_rect_pack.h
https://github.com/ands/trianglepacker
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Www Which WASM Works
The STB headers are mostly built like that: https://github.com/nothings/stb
You could also add an optional 'convenience API' over the lower-level flexible-but-inconvenient core API, as long as core library can be compiled on its own.
In essence it's just a way to decouple the actually important library code from runtime environment details which might be better implemented outside the C/C++ stdlib.
It's already as simple as the stdlib IO functions not being asynchrononous while many operating systems provide more modern alternatives. For a specific type of library (such an image decoder) it's often better to delegate such details to the library user instead of circumventing the stdlib and talking directly to OS APIs.
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File for Divorce from LLVM
My stuff for instance:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol
...inspired by:
https://github.com/nothings/stb
But it's not so much about the build system, but requiring a separate C/C++ compiler toolchain (Rust needs this, Zig currently does not - unless the proposal is implemented).
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What C libraries do you use the most?
STB Libraries: https://github.com/nothings/stb
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[Noob Question] How do C programmers get around not having hash maps?
stb_ds is also very popular.
- Is there an existing multidimensional hash table implementation in C?
What are some alternatives?
imgui - Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies
Vcpkg - C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS
nuklear - A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library
imgui-node-editor - Node Editor built using Dear ImGui
wxWidgets - Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library
ZXing - ZXing ("Zebra Crossing") barcode scanning library for Java, Android
nana - a modern C++ GUI library
freetype-gl - OpenGL text using one vertex buffer, one texture and FreeType
ncurses - snapshots of ncurses - see http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html (no pull requests are accepted)
ImageMagick - 🧙♂️ ImageMagick 7
GTK+ - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk
Cppcheck - static analysis of C/C++ code