Will share source code if someone is interested, but key bits:
- had a small JS glue layer using CanvasRenderingContext2D to render
- made a `wasm32-freestanding` build to lower the wasm bundle size, which meant shimming the bits of the libc microui uses
Narishma 3 hours ago [-]
Your demo seems to constantly consume 100% CPU at all times.
onsclom 2 hours ago [-]
Ooh interesting. What is your machine and browser? On chrome with my m1 macbook it takes less than 1ms to compute and render each frame, but I am noticing some things I can optimize from the performance flame graph! I will say, I find chrome to be way more efficient for ctx2d things than firefox or safari.
starik36 1 hours ago [-]
Why is the WASM demo so fuzzy? I am on Windows/Firefox.
pretty nifty but im trying to figure out what the use case for this is when its aimed at hobbyists ?
I use pygtk and dont have to fiddle with lower level stuff
flohofwoe 11 hours ago [-]
Minimal debugging/controller overlays for games would be the most obvious use case (e.g. similar to dat.gui for web).
Levitating 6 hours ago [-]
pygtk requires GTK, this library works with any rendering library that can draw rectangles and text
kartoffelsaft 13 hours ago [-]
This has been my goto for personal toy projects for a while now. Trivial to slot in to basically anything that can display text and takes mouse input.
I will mention, however, it's kinda abandonware at this point. There is some bug with the draw call iterator which does a misaligned pointer access, which, if your environment is set up to catch that, can get annoying (Zig for example panics on it). There's a github issue that some have used as reason to fork it but all the forks I tried were subtly wrong, for what that's worth.
leecommamichael 5 hours ago [-]
Genuine question; abandonware or complete? Something of this size serves as a nice substrate or starting-point regardless.
packetlost 12 hours ago [-]
> it's kinda abandonware at this point
That's sad. I'm a fan of rxi's work, including this one.
pstuart 2 hours ago [-]
It's MIT and these days handing it off to Claude to tart it up as needed should be viable.
Intralexical 4 hours ago [-]
The whole thing's less than 2kLoCs. If it needs ongoing maintenance, something's gone wrong IMO.
I think it's reasonable to just patch it yourself if it doesn't work with your other tools (Zig). Though thank you for sharing the heads up.
It's not mine; just a project I've toyed with a few times in my search for GUI toolkits over the years. Issues and/or PRs can be filed on the github page though.
kettlez 12 hours ago [-]
This is included in the Odin vendor libraries, it's fantastic for Raylib debug menus
love the web assembly demo. By the way, I hope this kind of interface for the web becomes more mainstream in the future, I start to hate html / css cuz everything looks the same because of it (even in the train stations they use it for scheduling)
abtinf 14 hours ago [-]
The first thing I look for in any UI library is accessibility support. Makes it trivial to filter out toy projects.
RodgerTheGreat 14 hours ago [-]
"Accessibility" is an open-ended set of functionality, not a checkbox; it is never "complete", there is always room for improvement. Colorblind support (which ones)? High-Contrast mode? Adjustable text size? Screenreader integration? Localization? IME support? Keyboard navigation? Keyboard remapping? Functional entirely without a keyboard? Touch support? Pen support? Dyslexia-aiding typefaces? The list goes on and on.
Dwedit 13 hours ago [-]
One clearly defined starting point is exposing any custom controls to accessibility APIs that are used to enumerate and interact (simulated mouse actions, reading the text, etc) with controls on the screen. Both scripting tools and screen readers make use of these. Built-in controls already have the enumeration and interaction feature and don't need additional code, but custom controls may not have that.
In the MicroUI example here, there are buttons and text labels and other kinds of controls, but no ability for an outside process to enumerate or interact with the controls. Any program will just set a single giant window with no text and no controls inside. Accessibility software can still hook text output APIs, but not if it also uses custom font rendering.
Anyway, the Windows accessibility API is just implementing a few COM objects, and COM (other than the specific ABI used for storing the vtable and function call convention) is not necessarily specific to Win32.
jazzypants 13 hours ago [-]
This is one of the reasons why web technology is so popular and persistent. You get almost all of that for free as long as you use semantic HTML.
ironmagma 6 hours ago [-]
Not true... this is why they had to add aria- ...
jazzypants 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, exactly! Now, it's all built into the platform.
The first WAI-ARIA specification was published in 2014 [0]. HTML5 became an official W3C recommendation that same year [1]. It includes semantic elements like <nav> and <main> that have ARIA roles built in [2]. The Wikipedia page for WAI-ARIA includes the "five rules of ARIA" where the first rule is "Don’t use ARIA if you can achieve the same semantics with a native HTML element or attribute" [3].
You almost always still need some extra ARIA attributes to be fully accessible, but it's much less extra work than most other platforms and it works (mostly) the same on every operating system (including phones). You don't have to build anything yourself-- you just have to know which attributes to use. Just ask any blind people you know whether they prefer using a website or a native app.
No. As much as I would like it to be the case, that is most certainly a poor criteria to evaluate a UI library.
Dear ImGui [0] is without a doubt the most prevalent immediate mode UI library. It does not have native accessibility features, but that hasn't stopped companies such as Intel, Meta, IKEA and Google from shipping products built upon it. It's also used in a ton of games.
Calling Dear ImGui a toy project at this point would be like calling Unreal Engine a toy project.
It's a shame accessibility support is not more widespread, and furthermore it's a shame that it is so laborious to add it.
OK, if "toy project" isn't the right word, then perhaps, "unethical" or "exclusionary" would be better words to use.
I judge software harshly that could be useful to folks with accessibility needs that don't try to address it (within bounds of their resources and capabilities, obviously lots of OSS just doesn't have the ability to deliver an accessible experience for tiny little throwaway apps). I definitely choose technologies to use based on whether they can be accessible with a little extra effort on my part. I'm not necessarily good at it, it's a complicated topic, but when I get bug reports about an accessibility issue I tend to drop everything else and try to fix it.
I guess a lot of folks consider games exclusively for folks without those accessibility needs, so maybe that's why something like Dear ImGui can live for years in thousands of projects without anyone complaining about accessibility. But, I wouldn't consider it for anything that isn't specifically about graphics and I don't think anyone else should either. (No one has to listen to me, but I think less of them.)
Intralexical 4 hours ago [-]
> I guess a lot of folks consider games exclusively for folks without those accessibility needs, so maybe that's why something like Dear ImGui can live for years in thousands of projects without anyone complaining about accessibility. But, I wouldn't consider it for anything that isn't specifically about graphics and I don't think anyone else should either. (No one has to listen to me, but I think less of them.)
Immediate mode UIs are mostly for debug menus, not even gameplay/graphics. It doesn't need to be accessible to anyone except for the developer(s) choosing the library and making the game. (If the developer has different needs, obviously they can choose another library, unlike users who must live with the developer's choice.) The fourth sentence in the linked ImGUI repository explains this intention very clearly.
You can spend all this energy imagining malice and thinking less of others, but doing so does not add merit to your critique. Nor does it advance the cause of software accessibility.
14u2c 5 hours ago [-]
You've cherry picked a very specific example that is designed to run in 3d engines. For anything rendering at standard OS api level level (the vast majority libs), accessibility is fine as evaluation criteria.
Intralexical 4 hours ago [-]
> You've cherry picked a very specific example that is designed to run in 3d engines.
This post is about a minimal immediate mode library made by a game dev, most suitable for debug menus.
It's unreasonable to treat it as a platform for soapboxing about "the vast majority libs" that are unrelated.
whizzter 14 hours ago [-]
This is a library in similar vein to "Dear imgui", minimal requirements for integration (rectangle and text rendering) so that it's easy to embed into game-engines,etc for debug UI's and similar things.
functionmouse 4 hours ago [-]
Windows XP has better accessibility than anything since, by virtue of staying entirely out of the way of accessibility tools. Time to downgrade!
qsera 12 hours ago [-]
Not very smart. I would go further and say that even full unicode support could be avoided and a software can still be massively useful.
It is sad that the world is so hung up on unicode and things like accessibility that we all have to submit to the tyranny of browser layers!
anonymous908213 10 hours ago [-]
> sad that the world is so hung up on unicode
It is sad that the world is hung up on enabling 2/3rds of the world population to read and write text! If only the entire world catered to America. Nobody should ever speak anything other than English, honestly.
qsera 8 hours ago [-]
Get a load of this guy here. He thinks that humans beings cannot communicate if some computer programs does not talk in their language!
monocasa 14 hours ago [-]
Or, not every UI library is intended for use cases where a13y even makes sense.
Like a debug UI in a game engine, or in an embedded device that doesn't even have input for a13y.
fwip 12 hours ago [-]
Being accessible to the intended users always matters. If you think it doesn't, that probably means it's currently accessible to those users (or that those who are it is inaccessible to have filtered themselves out, and are no longer users).
For example - in your debug UI, colorblind-friendly colors don't matter, until you hire your twelfth member of the team, who struggles to tell red and green apart.
monocasa 12 hours ago [-]
This library's default is greyscale anyway, so it's by default colorblind friendly.
Intralexical 3 hours ago [-]
Additionally the developer of this library is active in the indie game scene, so "twelfth member of the team" is hardly a relevant issue.
I find it so unfortunate how many of the criticisms raised here are mooted by simply glancing at the README.
There's an interesting conversation that could be had about the needs and limitations for debug UIs, and how to balance that with minimal code. (E.G. Would feeding this library's text-and-rectangles output into an accessible renderer be enough?) But blanket rejections and reflexive judgement aren't helpful.
ricardobeat 7 hours ago [-]
Is there any game engine out there with good accessibility support for their UI?
nkrisc 7 hours ago [-]
I can’t say how it compares to others, but Godot added screen reader support in 4.5 a year or so ago.
SeasonalEnnui 11 hours ago [-]
I agree, and the lack of empathy around this area is sad. If you're developing an app, it is better to fall into the pit of success by using a UI framework that already has accessibility baked in. Any project that uses Dear Imgui for end-user applications has already made a bad design choice.
AccessKit (https://accesskit.dev/) seems to be a positive step forward, with some UI frameworks implemented (including immediate mode egui).
Intralexical 3 hours ago [-]
> Any project that uses Dear Imgui for end-user applications has already made a bad design choice.
Note that any project using Dear ImGui will presumably have read the README for it, the second paragraph of which starts:
> Dear ImGui is designed to enable fast iterations and to empower programmers to create content creation tools and visualization / debug tools (as opposed to UI for the average end-user).
einpoklum 6 hours ago [-]
It's supposed to be a _tiny_ library. Naturally its capabilities will tend towards being minimal. I don't expect decent RTL language support, for example, although it's quite important if those are the languages where you live.
As for linking to something written in Rust with bindings etc. - that is the opposite of tiny when you consider the dependencies, and it would not be portable to weaker or older systems.
jdmoreira 13 hours ago [-]
What? On a micro immediate mode UI?
Really insane comment TBH
dwb 12 hours ago [-]
The point of a UI library is to interface with users. If it totally fails to interface with a subset of users then it is obviously deficient to some degree. It is callous and foolish to dismiss offhand users who rely on assistive technologies. You probably have a poor idea of who they are and how many people we’re talking about. You never know when you or someone you care about will become one of them, even temporarily. You never know how far your software will reach when you write it.
spwa4 14 hours ago [-]
Then just save yourself some time. Immediate mode and accessibility are mutually exclusive.
afavour 13 hours ago [-]
Cool to see a demo in there that you can run in a browser, presumably compiled to WebAssembly. The kind of thing that was unimaginable years ago.
hparadiz 6 hours ago [-]
I need something like this but with a few more bells and whistles.
amelius 5 hours ago [-]
The problem is always: you don't know beforehand what bells and whistles you will need. That's why Qt is probably the only safe bet (or Web/Electron if you don't mind the slower performance).
hparadiz 5 hours ago [-]
I know exactly what I need. I just built a task manager in C with GTK+. It uses the theming built into GTK to allow users to change themes while the program is running but it's too memory heavy for my taste. I also have a background in web dev and understand how to build for accessibility. Currently the memory allocated for every single process on my computer is <3 MB but the interface displaying that information uses almost 55MB total when rendering. I need the ability to set fonts, colors, and sizes and the ability draw text as desktop manager understandable standard copy/pastable text. I want the font rendering to support basic anti aliasing. The API also needs to expose draw surfaces for me to draw OpenGL/Vulkan as needed. It needs to support both X and Waylandisms for window decorations. I specifically need the API to support animated icons for window decorations as that is currently unsupported by anyone at all in this space. https://github.com/hparadiz/evemon
You're right though I'm already thinking of scaling and hidpi as another thing I need.
OvervCW 13 hours ago [-]
What is the advantage of this compared to Dear Imgui?
ranger_danger 13 hours ago [-]
it's lighter weight and written in C
em-bee 9 hours ago [-]
anyone working on bindings to other languages? (go, python, ruby, etc)
HumblyTossed 9 hours ago [-]
I was just thinking this would be great with go. If it would work.
einpoklum 6 hours ago [-]
How can such a library be both tiny and portable, when the C standard library has no graphics facilities? Don't you need to lay down a lot of basis for different platforms and graphics backends, to be portable? And if you do that, how can you be tiny?
b3orn 6 hours ago [-]
Almost all of these immediate mode UI libraries for C/C++ come without a rendering backend. Usually there are "example" implementations for libraries like SDL that you can use, or you implement your own backend. A lot of these libraries are popular for debug UIs in games and you probably need a custom backend for whatever graphics engine you use in your game.
synergy20 13 hours ago [-]
how is this different from lvgl? is this immediate mode or retained mode?
flohofwoe 11 hours ago [-]
Very different, starting at the line count:
Lvgl is 440kloc across 1134 files (in the src directory), while microui is 1121 lines of code in one .c and one .h file.
Microui is immediate mode, very minimal and 'bring your own renderer'. Probably most useful for adding a small debugging UI to a 3D game/app.
peter_d_sherman 15 hours ago [-]
>"Features
o Tiny: around 1100 sloc of ANSI C
o Works within a fixed-sized memory region: no additional memory is allocated
o Built-in controls: window, scrollable panel, button, slider, textbox, label, checkbox, wordwrapped text
o Works with any rendering system that can draw rectangles and text
o Designed to allow the user to easily add custom controls
o Simple layout system"
ur-whale 14 hours ago [-]
Nice, except the hard part seems to be missing: interfacing with an actual window system (X11, TUI, WIN32, whatever ...)
exDM69 14 hours ago [-]
That's the whole point!
You plug it into your project and it can be rendered on anything that can push pixels and/or triangles to the screen. Events from windowing system go in, list of triangles comes out.
This is intended to be used with OpenGL, Vulkan, D3D and other graphics environment and used in cases where integrating a "real" GUI toolkit would be more trouble than it's worth.
Other popular libs like Dear Imgui or Egui work the same way.
flohofwoe 11 hours ago [-]
It's a "bring your own renderer" UI framework, just like Dear ImGui or Nuklear. In some situation (e.g. when adding debugging UIs to a game) this is actually a big advantage compared to the renderer being baked into the library, since the game already has a renderer subsystem which the UI can easily hook into.
foul 14 hours ago [-]
In demo/ someone can "steal" the renderer part which, being based on SDL, is to some extent cross-platform.
Littice 15 hours ago [-]
Immediate-mode in pure C is a nice constraint. how does it handle text rendering, do you bring your own atlas or is there something built in? Thats usually the part that balloons the dependency footprint.
flohofwoe 11 hours ago [-]
The demo uses a simple prebuilt fixed-size font atlas texture and renders the entire UI (including character quads) via batched glDrawElements calls (one draw call per clip-rect).
But the way how text rendering is delegated to the user is quite flexible, microui basically calls these three user-provided functions:
int r_get_text_height(void)
int r_get_text_width(const char* text, int len);
void r_draw_text(const char* text, mu_Vec2 pos, mu_Color color);
...how r_draw_text() is implemented is then entirely up to you.
WASM demo: https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/sgl-microui-sapp.html
Source code: https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/master/sapp/sgl...
The renderer backend is just a bunch of C functions you need to provide:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/3f4185a8578cd2b...
It's also interesting to compare the binary sizes:
microui sample (https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/sgl-microui-sapp.html): 79.6 KBytes compressed download
Nuklear sample (https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/nuklear-sapp.html): 155 kb compressed download
Dear ImGui sample (https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/imgui-sapp.html): 491 KB compressed download
Will share source code if someone is interested, but key bits:
- had a small JS glue layer using CanvasRenderingContext2D to render
- made a `wasm32-freestanding` build to lower the wasm bundle size, which meant shimming the bits of the libc microui uses
https://imgur.com/uy78t52
I use pygtk and dont have to fiddle with lower level stuff
I will mention, however, it's kinda abandonware at this point. There is some bug with the draw call iterator which does a misaligned pointer access, which, if your environment is set up to catch that, can get annoying (Zig for example panics on it). There's a github issue that some have used as reason to fork it but all the forks I tried were subtly wrong, for what that's worth.
That's sad. I'm a fan of rxi's work, including this one.
I think it's reasonable to just patch it yourself if it doesn't work with your other tools (Zig). Though thank you for sharing the heads up.
Cosmopolitan Libc has since integrated the bits to make OpenGL work in cross-platform binaries and it's awesome.
[0] https://libagar.org/
https://libagar.org/screenshots/agar171.png
https://github.com/raysan5/raygui
But I found it pretty straightforward (and satisfying) to just build my own gui functions/widgets with raylib (inspired by raygui).
https://github.com/dsego/strobe-tuner/blob/main/app/gui.odin
In the MicroUI example here, there are buttons and text labels and other kinds of controls, but no ability for an outside process to enumerate or interact with the controls. Any program will just set a single giant window with no text and no controls inside. Accessibility software can still hook text output APIs, but not if it also uses custom font rendering.
Anyway, the Windows accessibility API is just implementing a few COM objects, and COM (other than the specific ABI used for storing the vtable and function call convention) is not necessarily specific to Win32.
The first WAI-ARIA specification was published in 2014 [0]. HTML5 became an official W3C recommendation that same year [1]. It includes semantic elements like <nav> and <main> that have ARIA roles built in [2]. The Wikipedia page for WAI-ARIA includes the "five rules of ARIA" where the first rule is "Don’t use ARIA if you can achieve the same semantics with a native HTML element or attribute" [3].
You almost always still need some extra ARIA attributes to be fully accessible, but it's much less extra work than most other platforms and it works (mostly) the same on every operating system (including phones). You don't have to build anything yourself-- you just have to know which attributes to use. Just ask any blind people you know whether they prefer using a website or a native app.
[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-wai-aria-20140320/Overview.ht...
[1] https://www.w3.org/news/2014/html5-is-a-w3c-recommendation/
[2] https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/html/H101
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAI-ARIA
Dear ImGui [0] is without a doubt the most prevalent immediate mode UI library. It does not have native accessibility features, but that hasn't stopped companies such as Intel, Meta, IKEA and Google from shipping products built upon it. It's also used in a ton of games.
Calling Dear ImGui a toy project at this point would be like calling Unreal Engine a toy project.
It's a shame accessibility support is not more widespread, and furthermore it's a shame that it is so laborious to add it.
0: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/
I judge software harshly that could be useful to folks with accessibility needs that don't try to address it (within bounds of their resources and capabilities, obviously lots of OSS just doesn't have the ability to deliver an accessible experience for tiny little throwaway apps). I definitely choose technologies to use based on whether they can be accessible with a little extra effort on my part. I'm not necessarily good at it, it's a complicated topic, but when I get bug reports about an accessibility issue I tend to drop everything else and try to fix it.
I guess a lot of folks consider games exclusively for folks without those accessibility needs, so maybe that's why something like Dear ImGui can live for years in thousands of projects without anyone complaining about accessibility. But, I wouldn't consider it for anything that isn't specifically about graphics and I don't think anyone else should either. (No one has to listen to me, but I think less of them.)
Immediate mode UIs are mostly for debug menus, not even gameplay/graphics. It doesn't need to be accessible to anyone except for the developer(s) choosing the library and making the game. (If the developer has different needs, obviously they can choose another library, unlike users who must live with the developer's choice.) The fourth sentence in the linked ImGUI repository explains this intention very clearly.
You can spend all this energy imagining malice and thinking less of others, but doing so does not add merit to your critique. Nor does it advance the cause of software accessibility.
This post is about a minimal immediate mode library made by a game dev, most suitable for debug menus.
It's unreasonable to treat it as a platform for soapboxing about "the vast majority libs" that are unrelated.
It is sad that the world is so hung up on unicode and things like accessibility that we all have to submit to the tyranny of browser layers!
It is sad that the world is hung up on enabling 2/3rds of the world population to read and write text! If only the entire world catered to America. Nobody should ever speak anything other than English, honestly.
Like a debug UI in a game engine, or in an embedded device that doesn't even have input for a13y.
For example - in your debug UI, colorblind-friendly colors don't matter, until you hire your twelfth member of the team, who struggles to tell red and green apart.
I find it so unfortunate how many of the criticisms raised here are mooted by simply glancing at the README.
There's an interesting conversation that could be had about the needs and limitations for debug UIs, and how to balance that with minimal code. (E.G. Would feeding this library's text-and-rectangles output into an accessible renderer be enough?) But blanket rejections and reflexive judgement aren't helpful.
Note that any project using Dear ImGui will presumably have read the README for it, the second paragraph of which starts:
> Dear ImGui is designed to enable fast iterations and to empower programmers to create content creation tools and visualization / debug tools (as opposed to UI for the average end-user).
As for linking to something written in Rust with bindings etc. - that is the opposite of tiny when you consider the dependencies, and it would not be portable to weaker or older systems.
Really insane comment TBH
You're right though I'm already thinking of scaling and hidpi as another thing I need.
Lvgl is 440kloc across 1134 files (in the src directory), while microui is 1121 lines of code in one .c and one .h file.
Microui is immediate mode, very minimal and 'bring your own renderer'. Probably most useful for adding a small debugging UI to a 3D game/app.
o Tiny: around 1100 sloc of ANSI C
o Works within a fixed-sized memory region: no additional memory is allocated
o Built-in controls: window, scrollable panel, button, slider, textbox, label, checkbox, wordwrapped text
o Works with any rendering system that can draw rectangles and text
o Designed to allow the user to easily add custom controls
o Simple layout system"
You plug it into your project and it can be rendered on anything that can push pixels and/or triangles to the screen. Events from windowing system go in, list of triangles comes out.
This is intended to be used with OpenGL, Vulkan, D3D and other graphics environment and used in cases where integrating a "real" GUI toolkit would be more trouble than it's worth.
Other popular libs like Dear Imgui or Egui work the same way.
But the way how text rendering is delegated to the user is quite flexible, microui basically calls these three user-provided functions:
...how r_draw_text() is implemented is then entirely up to you.