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Raygui – A simple and easy-to-use immediate-mode GUI library

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Re: Raygui – A simple and easy-to-use immediate-mode GUI library

#111

Post by AussieWog93 »

gmueckl wrote: post #110
AussieWog93 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not at all true, at least for Dear ImGui. I reimplemented the text rendering in it at one stage (we needed to support arbitrary unicode strings, specifically file names with CJK characters), drilling all the way down to individual OpenGL calls to get it running [1]. Apart from any driver-level caches, there really is no UI state. [1] For what it's worth, this was an easier undertaking than simply recompiling Q…

What you're saying is copmpletely wrong. ImGUI is transparently creating structs with internal widget state for every slightly more complex widget on the screen. Look at the state structs in imgui_internal.h to get an idea of what I'm talking about, e.g. ImGuiInputTextState or the huge ImGuiWindow structs. The apparent statelessness of immediate mode GUIs is an illusion that is produced by an extra layer of internal…

ImGuiWindow is an exception to the rule in that it basically serves as a canvas for other widgets to be drawn on.

Regarding complex widgets like TextInput or Tables having state, I'm completely OK with that. The problem with state in a retained-mode GUI is that it's stored in two places and can easily fall out of sync/create performance-related footguns/create unnecessary work building widgets. Whether or not they're "pure" immediate mode is not the point.

Re: Raygui – A simple and easy-to-use immediate-mode GUI library

#115

Post by setr »

999900000999 wrote: post #95
setr wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The more complex and more dynamic the UI, the worse the separation gets. The worst of it being when you’re writing code to generate your XML/HTML, and probably introducing a third “templating” language to continue the pretense that HTML/XML is not just standard data structures defined in a different syntax. The purpose of XML/HTML is to make your GUI specification independent of the programming language itself,…

So now I'm assuming, you're approach would be to just have classes for your custom UI elements. It might just be a Unity thing, but up until they released their XML UI tools, I could not build a decent UI for the life of me. Basic things like getting buttons to appear where I want them to are very hard without XML

It’s ultimately the same; XML largely maps to a class with attributes (and an identifier/navigation through XPATH) fairly strictly.

And it should largely take you the same amount of effort;

    Div ( 
      button(…)
    )
And

    
       …
is equivalent. Things like separating your definition from your styling isn’t a feature of HTML/CSS, it’s a feature of the API design — the API just happens to be encoded one way or the other. In-line callbacks vs a selector + callbacks is the same as well (you still need a way to navigate the hierarchy, but XPATH & co. makes just as much sense on an object tree as it does on XML — although with code, you could also just keep the pointer around)

I don’t know unity’s API’s, but I’d bet that their GUI API doesn’t actually look much like their XML API; and that if they did, you’d have had just as much, or little, trouble picking it up.

Re: Raygui – A simple and easy-to-use immediate-mode GUI library

#116

Post by ocornut »

modeless wrote: post #61
AbuAssar wrote: post #53

Does anyone care to explain what immediate mode means?

Immediate mode is a style of API where important state is kept in user code instead of being retained inside the API implementation. For example, an immediate mode GUI checkbox implementation does not store a boolean value determining whether the checkbox is checked. Instead, user code passes that information as a function parameter whenever the UI needs to be drawn. Even the fact that a checkbox exists on screen is…

I picked your write-up on that unstructured attempt of making a page of definitions: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/About-the-IMGUI-paradi... Thanks!

Re: Raygui – A simple and easy-to-use immediate-mode GUI library

#117

Post by modeless »

ocornut wrote: post #116
modeless wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immediate mode is a style of API where important state is kept in user code instead of being retained inside the API implementation. For example, an immediate mode GUI checkbox implementation does not store a boolean value determining whether the checkbox is checked. Instead, user code passes that information as a function parameter whenever the UI needs to be drawn. Even the fact that a checkbox exists on screen is…

I picked your write-up on that unstructured attempt of making a page of definitions: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/About-the-IMGUI-paradi... Thanks!

Cool! Feel free to use it and modify it however you want if that would be useful, no attribution required.
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