Dear ImGui – Bloat-free graphical user interface library for C++
As much as I like Dear ImGui, the immediate mode paradigm doesn&#x27;t work everywhere. The problem of &quot;page tearing&quot; (not to be confused with vsync) means you either need to render frames continuously, or at least 2 frames for every time you get input or need to implement some kind of &quot;retained mode state tracking&quot; on top of Imgui. It&#x27;s good for games, but for applications where you&#x27;re not rendering new frames constantly, the paradigm doesn&#x27;t seem a very good fit.<p>I wish there was a retained mode GUI library that would be as easy to integrate in your game and graphics apps as ImGui (or nuklear) is.<p>On my spare time, I&#x27;ve been working on a retained mode GUI layout and rendering framework (not a complete GUI toolkit) that uses a DOM-like tree, CSS style flexbox layouts and produces a vertex buffer for rendering like ImGui does.<p>Unfortunately life gets in the way, and all I have to show for my project is a small prototype in C and another one in Rust (can&#x27;t decide which I like more) that draws some text and rectangles with a fancy layout. Code is not public at the moment but I&#x27;m willing to share it with anyone (on GitHub) who responds with a thoughtful comment or a good question.<p>I have been following Raph Levien&#x27;s fantastic work on Druid and Rust GUIs which has been very inspirational, this video in particular [0].<p>Where Raph is focused on native GUI rendering and high fidelity text output, I&#x27;ve only focused on rendering in a GPU application using shaders and only very basic text layout with simple kerning (like Dear ImGui).<p>As Raph points out in his later talks on the topic, layout and rendering are only half of the GUI puzzle. The other half is maintaining the state of the application, usually through some kind of widget tree.<p>Leave a comment if you&#x27;re interested, I&#x27;d be happy to chat even though it doesn&#x27;t seem like my projects are going anywhere anytime soon.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4YTfxresvS8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4YTfxresvS8</a>  Data Oriented GUI in Rust by Raph Levien