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Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

github.com

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Re: Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

#21

Post by amelius »

prvc wrote: post #9

>This library is called Dear ImGui. Please refer to it as Dear ImGui (not ImGui, not IMGUI). >(The library misleadingly started its life in 2014 as "ImGui" due to the fact that I didn't give it a proper name when when I released 1.0, and had no particular expectation that it would take off. However, the term IMGUI (immediate-mode graphical user interface) was coined before and is being used in variety of other situat…

> Yes, but why "Dear"? Makes it read in an odd way wrt to idiomatic English.

And "ImGui" does not?

Re: Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

#23

Post by orbital-decay »

pansa2 wrote: post #14

Qt seems to be the most popular library for cross-platform GUI apps written in C++. Is Dear ImGui a credible alternative? How does Dear ImGui compare to Qt?

Qt is a full-fledged application framework with a retained mode GUI being just a part of it. Dear ImGui is a specialized immediate mode GUI library (hence the name).

Re: Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

#24

Post by pb82 »

pansa2 wrote: post #14

Qt seems to be the most popular library for cross-platform GUI apps written in C++. Is Dear ImGui a credible alternative? How does Dear ImGui compare to Qt?

They are very different in terms of usage. Dear ImGui is an immediate mode UI library which means that rendering and evaluation happen at the same time. You write for example:

if (ImGui::Button("X")) { //pressed handler }

This renders the button and handles its state at the same time.

Qt is a more traditional callback based UI although with their own signal/slot system which has nice features like thread safety built in. I last used Qt a while ago though so maybe it works different nowadays.

Re: Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

#26

Post by flohofwoe »

pansa2 wrote: post #14

Qt seems to be the most popular library for cross-platform GUI apps written in C++. Is Dear ImGui a credible alternative? How does Dear ImGui compare to Qt?

Depends on what you want to use it for.

Qt is essentially a full-blown operating system wrapper, Dear ImGui is much more focused on creating UIs quickly and has a different background (coming out of the gamedev world for creating inhouse-tools and debugging UIs integrated into games). It's just around 25kloc of code, has no external dependencies, compiles to a few dozen KBytes and is very easy to integrate into an existing code base.

Re: Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

#27

Post by flohofwoe »

amelius wrote: post #22

Does it support GPUs and Wayland directly?

ImGui itself doesn't have its own renderer, it just provides a list of simple rendering commands which then must be rendered by your own code (the git repo comes with ready-to-use example renderers using any of the standard 3D-APIs, GL, D3D, Metal, Vulkan, etc...). That way it's easy to integrate into existing code bases and portable to all sorts of "exotic" platforms (for instance game consoles - which generally don't have "standard" APIs).

Re: Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++

#28

Post by delroth »

ejolto wrote: post #19
prvc wrote: post #9

>This library is called Dear ImGui. Please refer to it as Dear ImGui (not ImGui, not IMGUI). >(The library misleadingly started its life in 2014 as "ImGui" due to the fact that I didn't give it a proper name when when I released 1.0, and had no particular expectation that it would take off. However, the term IMGUI (immediate-mode graphical user interface) was coined before and is being used in variety of other situat…

the owner is french, I bet the french "cher imgui" reads better.

No, it does not.
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