The State of the GUI

[drug]

On 24.10.2018 22:27, luckoverthere wrote:
> 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.

You are wrong about immediate mode a little bit. Yes, someone use it 
like you described above. But nothing prevent you from building 
efficient application. You can even build retained gui using immediate 
one. Moreover immediate mode is more efficient than retained in some cases.