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0 pointsmarginalia_nu3y ago0 comments

ImGui is amazing to work with though. Like holy fuck is it pleasant compared to basically every other UI-development paradigm ever in the history of user interfaces.

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6 comments · 2 top-level

pjmlp3y ago· 2 in thread

Accessiblity, designer,... and it isn't even the first, that is how GUIs used to be developed in 16 bit home computers for games.

It is like static linking, it was also there decades ago.

There are reasons why the world has moved on from those approaches.

flohofwoe3y ago

What's your point? Static linking makes a ton more sense than dynamic linking, except in a few special case niches (like plugin systems).

And OTH, event-driven UIs have also been around as long as UIs exist, that makes them at least as 'outdated' as immediate mode UIs.

pjmlp3y ago

The industry has moved beyond past decisions for a reason, that is the point.

Some of them keep being rediscovered in endless loops of fashion.

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jspdown3y ago· 2 in thread

Yes but that's because it's an immediate mode renderer.

It feels intuitive and that's why it's the de facto standard for building debug tooling. But this intuitiveness comes at a price! No matter how hard you try, this will always be slower and computationally heavy compared to retained mode.

Great for some stuff, terrible choice for some other.

legosexmagic3y ago

Your mixing up terms.

immediate mode rendering and immediate mode gui are unrelated. immediate mode gui libraries generally dont use immediate mode rendering because its realy slow.

immediate mode gui tends to be faster in practice because you just naturally end up with less code. also its very easy to write a retained mode ui ontop of an immediate mode gui library.

flohofwoe3y ago

The term "immediate mode UI" is about the API philosophy, not about how it works under the hood, and especially not how rendering is implemented (e.g. Dear ImGui records a command list for the whole frame which is then passed to the API user for rendering, this is pretty much the opposite of an 'immediate mode renderer').

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