The State of the GUI

[luckoverthere]

On Wednesday, 24 October 2018 at 13:13:53 UTC, drug wrote:
> 24.10.2018 16:00, Guillaume Piolat пишет:
>> - OpenGL does not "work everywhere". It's deprecated on macOS. 
>> In general portable APIs don't make any giant any money: the 
>> trend is fragmentation hence why abstraction over specific 
>> APIs is a must: that's where Unity was better than anyone else.
>> 
> So, nothing specific to OpenGL (it can be related to any other 
> technology). But in general I am agree with again - renderer 
> shouldn't be fixed. I recently started using `nuklear`, 
> immediate gui c library. it's totally platform and renderer 
> agnostic. We could use this way.

I'd be against using those API for GUI. Something like ImGui and 
Nuklear are made specifically for games in mind. For rapid 
prototyping and debugging. The GUI can be constructed and 
manipulate the logic in-place. What it does not do well is 
efficiency. The GUI is reconstructed from scratch every frame. 
This is not needed for most GUIs, that is incredibly inefficient. 
It suites games as you are already rendering a new frame every 
16ms or so. Qt uses OpenGL I think, but it doesn't render every 
frame. It'll optimize to try to reduce how many frames it has to 
create and it doesn't re-render anything it doesn't have to.