sokol VS imgui

Compare sokol vs imgui and see what are their differences.

sokol

minimal cross-platform standalone C headers (by floooh)

imgui

Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies (by ocornut)
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sokol imgui
38 351
5,885 55,717
- -
9.7 9.7
10 days ago about 15 hours ago
C C++
zlib License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

sokol

Posts with mentions or reviews of sokol. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-01-06.
  • STB: Single-file public domain libraries for C/C++
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Jan 2024
  • Container2wasm: Convert Containers to WASM Blobs
    16 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jan 2024
    I'm using Dear ImGui for my cross-platform code (which includes running in browsers):

    - https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/

    - https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/c64-ui.html

    - (start these samples by clicking on the little "UI" icon) https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/

    Platform abstraction is handled through the sokol headers: https://github.com/floooh/sokol

  • New Vulkan Documentation Website
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Oct 2023
    I wonder if using your library (https://github.com/floooh/sokol) instead of OpenGL will alleviate some of these issues for newcomers! There's already a sokol port of the learnopengl.com code (https://github.com/GeertArien/learnopengl-examples), so it shouldn't be too hard to match between the tutorial articles and these.
  • Meta Releases Intermediate Graphics Library
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jul 2023
    If you're looking for something like this, Sokol is a much simpler alternative:

    https://github.com/floooh/sokol

    It doesn't support vulkan though, but if that's important to you you're probably much better off just using vulkan directly since it's supported on all the major platforms.

  • Why glibc 2.34 removed libpthread
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Jul 2023
    All I can do is give you a couple of Github ticket links where users of my libraries stumbled over the issue (and with different symptoms):

    - https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/376

    - https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/404

    - https://github.com/floooh/cimgui-sokol-starterkit/issues/6

    We then added a dummy call to a no-op pthread function, so that users can better figure out that they need to use -pthread because now they get a linker error instead of a runtime crash or hang. This has since reduced the 'support overhead' quite a bit:

    - https://github.com/floooh/sokol/pull/456

  • File for Divorce from LLVM
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jun 2023
    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).

  • Minimal cross-platform standalone C headers
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Jun 2023
  • How can i play .wav file with C ?
    1 project | /r/C_Programming | 1 Jun 2023
    I have never personally used it but I'm pretty sure sokol has an audio library that might be what you are after.
  • Website with Godot?
    3 projects | /r/godot | 11 May 2023
    And I asked floooh for similar thoughts on making a website with sokol here: https://github.com/floooh/sokol/issues/825
  • I want to talk about WebGPU
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 May 2023
    It's not Rust and TS, instead C and JS, but Emscripten has a very nice way of integrating C/C++ and JS (you can just embed snippets of Javascript inside C/C++ source files), e.g. starting at this line, there's a couple of embedded Javascript functions which can be called like C functions directly from the "C side":

    https://github.com/floooh/sokol/blob/4535a3b4be59eb912e77e04...

imgui

Posts with mentions or reviews of imgui. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-06.
  • Using raylib with Dear ImGui: Game Dev Debugging UI
    5 projects | dev.to | 6 Apr 2024
    include(cmake/CPM.cmake) function(raylib_imgui_setup_dependencies) message(STATUS "Include Dear ImGui") FetchContent_Declare( ImGui GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/ocornut/imgui GIT_TAG 277ae93c41314ba5f4c7444f37c4319cdf07e8cf) # v1.90.4 FetchContent_MakeAvailable(ImGui) FetchContent_GetProperties(ImGui SOURCE_DIR IMGUI_DIR) add_library( imgui STATIC ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui.cpp ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui_draw.cpp ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui_widgets.cpp ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}/imgui_tables.cpp) target_include_directories(imgui INTERFACE ${imgui_SOURCE_DIR}) include(cmake/CPM.cmake) message(STATUS "Include dbg-macro") cpmaddpackage( "gh:sharkdp/dbg-macro#fb9976f410f8b29105818b20278cd0be0e853fe8" )# v0.5.1 message(STATUS "Include fmtlib") cpmaddpackage("gh:fmtlib/fmt#e69e5f977d458f2650bb346dadf2ad30c5320281" )# 10.x message(STATUS "Include raylib") cpmaddpackage("gh:raysan5/raylib#ae50bfa2cc569c0f8d5bc4315d39db64005b1b0" )# v5.0 message(STATUS "Include spdlog") cpmaddpackage("gh:gabime/spdlog#7c02e204c92545f869e2f04edaab1f19fe8b19fd" )# v1.13.0 message(STATUS "Include rlImGui") FetchContent_Declare( rlImGui GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/raylib-extras/rlImGui GIT_TAG d765c1ef3d37cf939f88aaa272a59a2713d654c9) FetchContent_MakeAvailable(rlImGui) FetchContent_GetProperties(rlImGui SOURCE_DIR RLIMGUI_DIR) add_library(rlimgui STATIC ${rlimgui_SOURCE_DIR}/rlImgui.cpp) target_link_libraries(rlimgui PRIVATE imgui raylib) target_include_directories(rlimgui INTERFACE ${rlimgui_SOURCE_DIR}) endfunction()
  • Ask HN: Fastest cross-platform GUI stack/strategy
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Mar 2024
  • Immediate Mode GUI Programming
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2024
    Immediate mode is a fuzzy concept, as witnessed by this writeup: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/About-the-IMGUI-paradi...
  • Nebula is an open-source and free-to-use modern C++ game engine
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jan 2024
  • Black Triangles
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
    It's fun to see the evolution in e.g. these examples of image loading for Dear Imgui:

    https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Image-Loading-and-Disp...

    DirectX9 will even load the image for you, DirectX11 okay we get a few more structures to fill out, DirectX12 is where it goes off the rails and we are filling out a bunch of UNKNOWN DONT_CARE JUST_DO_IT. Then of course Vulkan is the one that gets the big fat "this probably won't actually work for you" warning.

    I understand whats happening, but you know sometimes I just want to display a fucking image.

  • Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface with minimal dependencies
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 Dec 2023
    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

  • Where do I start to learn C++ for a game development
    2 projects | /r/gamedev | 10 Dec 2023
    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.
  • GUI library for fast prototyping
    3 projects | /r/rust | 6 Dec 2023
    AFAIK the Rust equivalent to C++'s Dear ImGui is egui.
  • Stretching myself thin with Dear ImGui projects
    2 projects | dev.to | 28 Nov 2023
    They use a Dear ImGui, a C++ GUI library.
  • PCSX2 Disables Wayland Support
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Nov 2023
    Aside from bugs and driver issues, Wayland has some unfortunate design limitations. For example, Dear ImGui multi-viewports don't work because "Wayland doesn't let application read or write windows positions."

    https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Multi-Viewports

    This is a feature available on Windows, macOS, and of course X11. Making choices like this means desktop Linux becomes even more of a weird island that nobody wants to support.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing sokol and imgui you can also consider the following projects:

bgfx - Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library.

wxWidgets - Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library

raylib - A simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming

nuklear - A single-header ANSI C immediate mode cross-platform GUI library

tinyrenderer - A brief computer graphics / rendering course

NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL

LearnOpenGL - Code repository of all OpenGL chapters from the book and its accompanying website https://learnopengl.com

GTK+ - Read-only mirror of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk

v - Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io

egui - egui: an easy-to-use immediate mode GUI in Rust that runs on both web and native

nanovg - Antialiased 2D vector drawing library on top of OpenGL for UI and visualizations.

CEGUI