ssgl VS imgui

It's here. I made a post about it too, there's some details in the comments on how this works.

Here I'm doing GLSL and running it via OpenGL on top of my own helper library (the main branch of the code repo explains it pretty well). For me it's the easiest way to code for a GPU by a wide margin, but I guess that's to be expected. For performance, the most important things here are using shared memory and persistent threads so there are less global reads and especially atomics (I wanted to do a local reduction on the end result but for whatever reason subgroup operations don't work on 64-bit integers and I didn't bother to write it out with shared memory)

Some of it is fine-grained control, some is how it’s nice to be able to treat shaders as separate entities, some is just different preference. But no actual limitation, in fact I built a thing for that on top of OpenGL.

Include is probably your best bet there. Personally I use this system that I made, which borrows the single source programming model from CUDA so that shaders are just reinterpreted C++ code that can sit within the rest of the program. This means I can call the same functions from C++ and the shaders, and includes work just like any other includes.

I also already have a library that gives compile time errors, by having the shaders just be a part of the C++ program :) This would also benefit slightly from having embedded files, as I wouldn't need to do the runtime hacks that are currently in place.

As a side note, you may be interested in this library that someone posted on /r/GraphicsProgramming awhile ago. Haven't used it, but it seems like it might fit in with your general design philosophy.

Because mine is the most faithful reproduction of GLSL I've seen. Almost all features work the same in C++ as they do in shaders -- the notable difference is that you can't pass swizzles by reference, and inout arguments have to be defined with a slightly wonky syntax.

The culmination of my attempts at wrapping OpenGL is ssgl, which foregoes basically all binding and lets you write shaders along C++ with semi-automatic lambda capture. The underlying implementation is filled with dragons, but from personal experience it's just bonkers how much nicer it is to work with compared to any other approach I've used.

I have a library that due to its nature (it defines a domain-specific language within C++) has to define macros for a bunch of words that some standard headers use as variable names. This causes the standard headers to completely break if my library headers are included before them, and the errors are less than intuitive. Is there a simple way to produce a meaningful error (like "library header must be included last") if a standard header is included after the library headers? Googling didn't help much, and at a quick glance standard headers don't appear to contain too many extremely common names that I could #define to static_assert or something. I'm fine with the sensible error being limited to a few of the big standard implementations, so the option of just going through the headers and finding enough such names is doable, but it'd be nice to have a cleaner solution.

Yeah, the state machine aspect does make debugging cumbersome, and it's very easy to forget some option in the wrong setting. But I don't fully agree with "a collection of spells", I think the steps to achieve something are (mostly) pretty straight forward. Though maybe memories go sweeter with time, I haven't written any binding code after making ssgl :-)

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()

Immediate mode is a fuzzy concept, as witnessed by this writeup: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/About-the-IMGUI-paradi...

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.

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

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.

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

They use a Dear ImGui, a C++ GUI library.

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.