NanoGUI VS Elements C++ GUI library

NanoGUI

With 2.5 days you probably don't want anything that requires much setup, so Qt is probably a non-starter. You could try this one: https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui, the examples are not the platonic ideal of modern C++ programming, but that also means you don't need much mastery of the language to hammer a program until it has a GUI.

I've dipped my toes into GUI development just enough to know you can have "simple," or you can have "native," but not both. There are smaller projects like nanogui[0] and microgui[1] out there, but of course they're only as small as they are because they don't use native widgets.

[0]https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui/tree/master/src

[1]https://github.com/ryankurte/micro-gui

### [NanoGUI](https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui)

I have only played with this briefly, but after the initial setup NanoGUI seemed pretty intuitive https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui

There's GTK which is all LGPL (ok to dynamic link to) and things like nanogui which is BSD (just attribution).

Wondering if this was inspired by Wenzel Jakob's nanogui [0] by any chance. (cz that's what I wanted to do, rewrite nanogui in C, so I don't have to rely on a C++ compiler).

[0] https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui

There's a relatively new C++ GUI library literally called "Elements". Not sure how it works though, but the way it looks, and the music background of its creator makes it appear designed for DAWs.

https://github.com/cycfi/elements

Further, if you we want a "modern" C++ GUI framework what actually would be modern would be to use mechanisms in the language itself as a quasi-DSL from within the language. This is something like what Joel de Guzman is doing with Elements

It's a complex domain. The closest we have at the moment is Elements which hasn't been proposed for Boost (yet?) but is by Joel de Guzman, the primary author of Boost.Spirit.

I ended up with elements gui https://github.com/cycfi/elements

If you don't want to use Qt I honestly think your best bet may be to become an early adopter of cycfi elements depending on your project. Elements is still rough but is useable for small applications. I think when it is finished it will be the best choice for a retained mode GUI library, but right now it is missing a lot of things (e.g. the standard common dialogs, "open", "Save as", etc.) , and has basically zero documentation.

github link

For the past year we were evaluating EFL, QML and Flutter for our embedded TV devices after having used the first two for last 5+ years and choice was made to go with Flutter. Performance is great, license is great, and development experience, judged by the whole development team, is the best. Hence my remark on being sad as QML could have had a great future, even transitioned to modern C++ without need for separate language, if there was a huge adoption and proper choices made by the company, e.g. see https://github.com/cycfi/elements.