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A comment on Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu. Parent comment

Re:Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu by piker on Friday February 13, 2026 @04:57PM (#47008383)
Yes, one argument that I didn't make in the post but that does favor immediate mode is that you can somewhat straightforwardly convert from an immediate mode GUI to retained mode by just introducing your own abstractions. In some sense this makes you more disciplined about the FPS which could be a net win over all.

[Note that Tritium at least is translated into a number of a different languages. That part isn't that hard.]

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Re:Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu by socalgal2 on Friday February 13, 2026 @09:16PM (#47010842)
hard is this: https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/

and this: https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/

those are both things most ImGUIs ignore. And, even if you pick some library that somehow handles the first you're left with all of the issue mentioned above.

To be clear, if I was writing a devtool (and I am actually) i'd reach for an ImGUI (and I did). But I'd be unlikely to use one for user facing tool.

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Re:Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu by jason_oster on Saturday February 14, 2026 @01:17AM (#47012092)
Those are also things that most retained mode GUIs ignore, unless they are "platform native". Only a small number of GUI implementations get these things right because they are hard. There are many, many GUI implementations, and most of them are pretty rough, to put it mildly.

It has nothing to do with how the state is managed. (This is the only distinction between immediate and retained modes.)

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Re:Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu by piker on Saturday February 14, 2026 @05:48AM (#47013469)
Tritium is a rich text editor. I'm familiar with the issues outlined in those posts.

To be fair with a lot of the GUI frameworks in various ecosystems ... they try to solve different pieces of them.

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