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flohofwoe
onsclom
I made my own WASM demo @ https://microui-wasm.vercel.app/ and it's only 14.6 kB compressed!
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
Your demo seems to constantly consume 100% CPU at all times.
onsclom
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
Why is the WASM demo so fuzzy? I am on Windows/Firefox.
flohofwoe
TL;DR: it can be all sorts of things, from 'half-pixel' positioning problems, to upscaling issues, to poor source data. I didn't put too much effort into getting the text rendering look good (and text rendering is hard).
More details:
The demo is using half-resolution on high-dpi displays (currently that's sokol-app's default setting, but not sure if that still makes sense in this day and age tbh), this half resolution amplifies all sorts of text rendering issues, and it gets especially bad when there's a fractional system-dpi-scale like 125% or 150%.
PS: another problem (maybe the main problem, even if everything else is correct) is that the demo's pre-baked font atlas texture isn't all that great since it has 'anti-aliasing' baked into the glyph pixels, and the font atlas texture has a very low resolution (glyph height is 10 pixels, which would be ok for a 'crisp' hand-drawn bitmap font, but not when the font atlas has been created from a regular TTF font, which this one seems to be).
Does this Dear ImGui demo look better on your setup? This is using the native display DPI and uses a TTF font instead of a bitmap font:
https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/imgui-highdpi-sapp.html
trastentrasten
Dear ImGui looks a lot better.
Intralexical
Looks like the rendering functions used in the demo are doing antialiasing without font hinting?
zuzululu
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
Minimal debugging/controller overlays for games would be the most obvious use case (e.g. similar to dat.gui for web).
Levitating
pygtk requires GTK, this library works with any rendering library that can draw rectangles and text
socalgal2
I asked Claude to write one from scratch. A few minutes later it was done with exactly the features I needed. I started with some existing one, but when it couldn't handle multiple pointers (2 hands in VR/AR each with a pointer) without major mods I end up asking Claude if it could replace it with a custom one.
It first said "that's a ton of work" to which I said, "Really? A basic IMGUI needs a texture with glyphs. The abiltiy to draw textured rectangles with vertex colors. Scissor support for clipping. Some hit testing." and it was like, "yea, you're right", and a few mins later it wrote what I needed.
I'm not saying you shouldn't use this library.
kartoffelsaft
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
Genuine question; abandonware or complete? Something of this size serves as a nice substrate or starting-point regardless.
Intralexical
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.
packetlost
> it's kinda abandonware at this point
That's sad. I'm a fan of rxi's work, including this one.
pstuart
It's MIT and these days handing it off to Claude to tart it up as needed should be viable.
haeseong
[flagged]
jacereda
I used this one in 2022 to make a proof of concept for a build once / run anywhere graphical app and IIRC the library was quite nice, even if a bit limited. The resulting kludge is at https://github.com/jacereda/cosmogfx and there's a prebuilt binary that should run on Linux, Windows and some BSDs. https://github.com/jacereda/cosmogfx/releases/download/v0.0....
Cosmopolitan Libc has since integrated the bits to make OpenGL work in cross-platform binaries and it's awesome.
0x0203
For a slightly larger, cross-platform, retained mode GUI written in C, there's libagar [0]. Different use case than MicroUI, but still a neat project.
kettlez
This is included in the Odin vendor libraries, it's fantastic for Raylib debug menus
dsego
Raylib also has Raygui
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
shideneyu
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)
afavour
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.
abtinf
The first thing I look for in any UI library is accessibility support. Makes it trivial to filter out toy projects.
RodgerTheGreat
"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
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
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
Not true... this is why they had to add aria- ...
LtWorf
Which nobody uses
xyzzy_plugh
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.
SwellJoe
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
> 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
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
> 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
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.
qsera
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
> 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
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
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
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
This library's default is greyscale anyway, so it's by default colorblind friendly.
functionmouse
Windows XP has better accessibility than anything since, by virtue of staying entirely out of the way of accessibility tools. Time to downgrade!
ricardobeat
Is there any game engine out there with good accessibility support for their UI?
nkrisc
I can’t say how it compares to others, but Godot added screen reader support in 4.5 a year or so ago.
jdmoreira
What? On a micro immediate mode UI?
Really insane comment TBH
dwb
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.
OvervCW
What is the advantage of this compared to Dear Imgui?
ranger_danger
it's lighter weight and written in C
hparadiz
I need something like this but with a few more bells and whistles.
amelius
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
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.
undefined
em-bee
anyone working on bindings to other languages? (go, python, ruby, etc)
HumblyTossed
I was just thinking this would be great with go. If it would work.
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I wrote a little demo to run microui on top of the sokol headers here, it's really interesting in how minimal it is.
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