wil VS imgui

Compare wil vs imgui and see what are their differences.

wil

Windows Implementation Library (by microsoft)

imgui

Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies (by ocornut)
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wil imgui
14 351
2,457 55,870
0.7% -
7.9 9.7
12 days ago 3 days ago
C++ C++
MIT 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.

wil

Posts with mentions or reviews of wil. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-19.
  • C-Macs – a pure C macOS application
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Apr 2024
    Even then, MFC and C++/CX were the only productive ways to use it from Microsoft SDKs.

    .NET isn't as convenient as VB 6 was, fully embracing COM as the VBX replacement model, technically introduced in VB5, but still some stuff was lacking.

    Then there is Delphi and C++ Builder.

    It beat me that having doubled down on COM since how Longhorn went down, and Windows team getting their way doing avoiding .NET to take over, they hardly managed to create nice tooling as the competition.

    Editing IDL files with a Notepad like experience, manually merging generated code, and a couple of frameworks that barely go beyond yet another way to do AddRef/Release/QueryInterface and aggregation.

    Meanwhile D-BUS, XPC and AIDL, provide much better dev experience.

    Pity that Borland products are kind of tainted due to mismanagement decisions, otherwise maybe fixing COM dev experience would already been seriously taken by VS team.

    Ah, nowadays WIL is probably the best approach when having only to consume COM.

    https://github.com/microsoft/wil

  • ntoskrnl7/crtsys: C/C++ Runtime library for system file (Windows Kernel Driver)
    4 projects | /r/cpp | 30 Jun 2022
    Have a look at WIL for a C++ library used by Microsoft themselves, including kernel development.
  • I'm thinking about using a struct to hold allocated memory and guaranteeing it will be released when the struct goes out of scope, as an alternative to smart pointers. What do you think?
    1 project | /r/cpp_questions | 6 May 2022
    I'm digging for more information and it looks like Microsoft's created a way to handle the problems I'm trying to address with this: https://github.com/Microsoft/wil/wiki/RAII-resource-wrappers
  • Unwrapping WinUI3 for C++
    1 project | /r/cpp | 28 Apr 2022
    Since we are on this subject, those that need a nice C++ library to deal with COM in VC++, are better served with WIL.
  • RISC-V J extension – Instructions for JITs
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2022
    Not since Vista.

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/reference/kernel-...

    > Creates a binary that can be executed in the Windows kernel. The code in the current project gets compiled and linked by using a simplified set of C++ language features that are specific to code that runs in kernel mode.

    And then there is WIL, https://github.com/microsoft/wil

    https://community.osr.com/discussion/291326/the-new-wil-libr...

    > First off, let me point out that this library is used to implement large parts of the OS. There are hundreds of developers here who use it. So unlike, uh, some other things that get tossed onto github, this project is not likely to wither and die tomorrow.

    > There are, however, only a handful of kernel developers working on the library, so the kernel support has been coming along much slower. I'd like to expand the existing kernel features in depth ....

  • ToaruOS 2.0
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Dec 2021
    > Plus C++ standard library can't be used anyway and auto pointers aren't really that much of a concern at the kernel level

    https://github.com/microsoft/wil

    "Ah, but that isn't used on the Windows kernel" would be the expected reply, well

    https://community.osr.com/discussion/291326/the-new-wil-libr...

    "Microsoft's toolchain does not ship a copy of the STL that works in kernel mode. Partly this is because the kernel's CRT doesn't support C++ exceptions. (And partly this is because I/O is wildly different in kernel, so you'd have to rewrite the implementation of all the I/O libraries.)

    But for kernel developers, wil ships a subset of an STL implementation. To avoid conflicting with the real STL, it's available under the wistd namespace. The rule of thumb is that wistd::foo is a drop-in replacement for std::foo."

  • Linux Sucks 2021 – The End of Linux Is Nigh
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Sep 2021
    Windows is a mix of legacy C code, which started to be migrated into C++ around the Vista time (hence /kernel in VC++) and .NET/COM (WinRT is basically COM with some extras).

    Modern kernel code makes use of WIL.

    https://github.com/microsoft/wil

  • Away from Exceptions: Errors as Values
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Aug 2021
  • Windows Implementation Libraries (WIL)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jul 2021
  • Finding Windows HANDLE leaks, in Chromium and others
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jul 2021

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 wil and imgui you can also consider the following projects:

cppwin32 - A modern C++ projection for the Win32 SDK

wxWidgets - Cross-Platform C++ GUI Library

winapi - Windows API declarations without <windows.h>, for internal Boost use.

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

toaruos - A completely-from-scratch hobby operating system: bootloader, kernel, drivers, C library, and userspace including a composited graphical UI, dynamic linker, syntax-highlighting text editor, network stack, etc.

NanoGUI - Minimalistic GUI library for OpenGL

stlkrn - C++ STL in the Windows Kernel with C++ Exception Support

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

win32metadata - Tooling to generate metadata for Win32 APIs in the Windows SDK.

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

crtsys - C/C++ Runtime library for system file (Windows Kernel Driver) - Supports Microsoft STL

CEGUI