kuraja

I'm thinking about learning SQL. Would it be a sane decision for me to learn EdgeQL instead, as my first introduction to databases?

> I saw the performance gains with my own eyes. Entire UIs would chew up less resources than a blank QWindow.

I already mentioned this: "many RMGUIs have heavy styling, visually incomparable to their IMGUI counterparts, which makes the average RMGUI far heavier". Dear IMGUI will be faster than the average RMGUI implementation. It's doing way less work. In addition to being cleaner internally.

For simple use cases, Dear IMGUI behaves like an RMGUI internally. (flohofwoe mentions this in another thread.) So its only performance impact is some minor caching overhead, which is far smaller than extra GPU work.

Probably a decent chunk of the perceptual issue you're seeing comes from their choice of font rendering library, which is noticeably "the IMGUI font rendering library", and looks amateurish. This is stb_truetype, which is a very primitive library, but is easy to install and incorporate. The other library is freetype+harfbuzz, which produces higher quality output, faster, and with lower memory. The cost of freetype is that installation is absurdly difficult, the maintainer is offensive, and the code is ancient, unreadable, and architecturally a disaster.

I don't think the chosen GUI library causes the other UI issues you perceive. The author probably hasn't put much time into learning visual design, and thus fell into whatever the UI library supported. But to produce a better one, the author would have had to do a lot more learning and thinking, which is independent of the library choice.

> There is literally no downside to using the IMGUI concept

There's a big downside, the performance penalty. For a GUI that renders moderately complex objects, the cost of not caching becomes overwhelming, the equivalent of losing 20 years in GL architecture advances. Pushing the VBO to the GPU each frame is the same as losing indexing. My own application doesn't render at 60 fps in immediate mode.

I find that people who believe that IMGUI is somehow faster than RMGUI are game developers who have been taken in by marketing, because basic knowledge of GPU programming (i.e. what is indexed rendering) is enough to see that this couldn't possibly be true. Their UIs are usually simple enough that the performance penalty is not important. And many RMGUIs have heavy styling, visually incomparable to their IMGUI counterparts, which makes the average RMGUI far heavier.