Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

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> Dear ImGui

> Cons

> nothing jumps out to me

Why the fuck am I reading this article? I could easily write "nothing jumps out to me" or list a bunch of first-impressions of GUI libraries. But I can tell you off-hand a list of cons for Dear ImGui, and if you're interested there are plenty of Qt -vs- ImGui comparisons out there based on people who have actually switched and done a writeup. (Various people fall on both sides of this debate.)

https://deplinenoise.wordpress.com/2017/03/05/why-qt-and-not...

https://gist.github.com/bkaradzic/853fd21a15542e0ec96f726815...

There are definitely use cases out there where Dear ImGui is a clear winner over Qt, and vice versa, and if you're going to compare GUI frameworks I would expect to want to know more about them.

I have a big ole' bag of Google Docs that contain comparisons like this, but I sure as hell ain't gonna share them because they're full of subjective declarations and I stop evaluating an option as soon as I've figured out it doesn't meet my needs.

I consent with you that many pros and cons are rather subjective and pros/cons depend on the specific use case. On the other hand, I like having a list of all these libraries with their supported platforms, license and a screenshot. This alone gives a pretty good overview of what's there. Not all pros/cons are subjective (e.g. having a GUI wysiwyg editor is definitely a pro for some use cases). Anyway, thanks for sharing your view and thanks for sharing this comprehensive overview.

Even the list of platforms is kinda pointless here, as Dear ImGui doesn't really support any platform itself. You're expected to write a glue yourself, with some examples for popular libraries/frameworks/engines being provided for your convenience (and those examples alone already go further than just four platforms listed in the article).

On the other hand, Qt is a whole framework itself which already handles all this stuff for you, which makes a lot of stuff easier, but then you're of course limited to what's supported by Qt.

Yes it is useful to have a list of everything, but I feel like I can get a list like this in about a half hour with Google. What I can't get in a half hour is a summary of the problems people have had with particular framework, or the reasons why they chose to start using or stop using a particular framework.

The picture from the beginning is very exciting and optimistic. To pick on ImGui again, it's easy to get started--but I know there are some issues with larger projects, some things that are hard to do in immediate mode, etc.

Agreed. I use Dear ImGui, I like it, but it's certainly not a general purpose tool which you can replace Qt with (or vice versa). It's a completely different project made for different use cases, and "nothing jumps out to me" in the list of cons sounds a lot like "I just started using it and I love it".

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