pixels VS egui

https://github.com/parasyte/pixels

That gives you a simple software framebuffer, and it builds as a native app or for the web.

On a more recent machine, that same (well, more primitive) app with pixels or softbuffer struggled beyond acceptable. But was definitely poorly written.

I’ve ported the application from being based on pixels crate to the powerful bevy game engine

Well, it depends on how you use it; writing to an image buffer isn't much less efficient than writing to any normal buffer (in fact, although displaying your scene to a window efficiently is important, your main bottleneck will be the actual ray tracing loop). You may want to read this article for a practical example of using an ImageBuffer to create and draw a texture with Piston. Other window backends you could use, apart from pixels which was already mentioned in another comment, include minifb and Mini GL, though I haven't personally used them.

You can use wgpu instead of opengl as in the pixels example: https://github.com/parasyte/pixels/tree/main/examples/minimal-fltk

It might be possible but with a raycaster you probably want to be able to easily set all pixels and create your own small engine. Something like the pixels crate should fit your purpose: https://github.com/parasyte/pixels

The reality is that I have used unsafe that is also unsound out of convenience because fixing it is a papercut too many. And this tends to be common! I know enough to spot unsoundness in other projects (sometimes even early). But not enough to be confident in my own abilities to write sound unsafe code. Why? Because it's really flipping hard, that's why!

Also, if you just want to get-things-done, then https://github.com/parasyte/pixels might be a bit better, to avoid reinventing the wheel.

However, I recently got a new M2 Macbook Air and started noticing some super weird behavior. While playing Pokemon Silver with an unlocked framerate, I'd notice that the game would slow down to below 60FPS, even on a release build. After printing a little debugging info I found the culprit in the rendering logic which was handled by the MiniFB crate. At first I thought switching to a GPU renderer (such as https://github.com/parasyte/pixels) would help, and it... kinda did?

pixels uses wgpu and runs fine.

Probably the hardest part, if you are new to egui, is to work out how to display the widgets you want. The egui demo site is quite handy in this regard. It features the egui widgets, and has GitHub links to the Rust code used to make each widget. This will help you replicate them in your own project.

Thanks for the feedback!

It is definitely fixable. Take a look at https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/996 for some examples of how others have styled egui, or try out https://app.rerun.io/

Styling is done with `ctx.set_style`, but creating a nice style isn't very easy at the moment (basically you'll have to tweak constants in code, and then recompile). I'm working on making it easier as we speak though!

Nothing is wrong with that, it’s rather a workaround, ultimately I am trying to have one language only including the UI too (been playing with egui),so I don’t have to use JavaScript.

https://github.com/emilk/egui

FWIW, I opened an issue: https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/4046

That's fair. I don't have experience with other immediate mode libraries. It's good to hear that it's not an intrinsic limitation

https://github.com/emilk/egui?tab=readme-ov-file#layout Here the author discusses the issue directly. They note that there are solutions to the issue, but that they all come with (in their opinion) significant drawbacks.

For my use case, if I have to do a lot of manual work to achieve what I consider behavior that should be handled by the framework, then I don't find that compelling and am inclined to use a retained mode implementation.

It totally depends on what IoT and what purpose, for example:

IIoT/PLC/industrial automation: most likely you will have to use vendors software, most if the time it’s crap, and a mix of several tech stacks like MSSQL/C#/C++

Sensors and such: depends on what are you building or using the sensors: the protocol mostly is MQTT, and if you would store it in a db postrrsql, elasticsearch, surreldb, influxdb among the most I used.

Robots/drones: on what I build, I use protobuf/grpc for performance and cross-language and direct linux socket io, and where needed websocket but mostly for any web interaction rather than the protocol itself. The tech stack for those, the embedded side is up to you or sometimes based on the sdk you are dealing with, the backend/frontend however, I used to use go/nodejs and for frontend svelte or a simple js library/framework, but recently I’m shifting and redoing everything in rust, embedded, backend and frontend (using something like egui https://github.com/emilk/egui).

When it comes to IoT, I try as much as possible to stay away from python unless you are scripting something else done in go/c++/rust, look at python as a glorified bash script, it’s useful for that or other data science work, but not in IoT.

Same goes with other tech you mentioned, it might suit one case but not another, for example, MQTT is good for sensor IoT type, but good luck controlling a drone with it, mongodb might be great to store a fleet of robots with its access credentials and such, but if you try to use it to store realtime data, it might not perform as expected, and so on.

AFAIK the Rust equivalent to C++'s Dear ImGui is egui.

The creator of Rerun (Emil Ernerfeldt) also created egui [1], an immediate GUI library for Rust. The library is similar to Dear ImGui but it is written in Rust and can be used for desktop and web apps (compiles to WASM and uses WebGL, demo [2]). Desktop apps can target OpenGL (does not display correct colors on macOS, does not work in VirtualBox on Windows) or WGPU (uses native APIs for each platform, works without any problems, but the binary is a big larger).

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui

> [...] you can build UIs that are snappy and keyboard driven.

That's not an advantage that is exclusive to TUIs; after all, you're running your TUI inside a graphical application that emulates a terminal. (Unless you're rocking an actual VT102, in which case I bow down to you.)

In fact there's an entire class of applications that are extremely snappy and keyboard driven, by their very nature: games.

Some people have taken to writing GUI apps like you'd write a game, and the effects range from OK to fantastic. Check out Lagrange (https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/), AppManager (https://tildegit.org/solene/AppManager), Dear ImGUI (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui), egui (https://github.com/emilk/egui), and many others.