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In my experience, it's the opposite. Immediate mode GUI, or at least a functional and declarative approach, is the only way I've seen it scale well. It's more modular and scale-independent. On the other hand, retained mode, or imperative/OOP approach to state management, becomes complicated and monstrous quickly; it's the dominant style and can be made to work OK, but typically hellish to maintain or develop beyond a certain scale.

Admittedly I'm simplifying too much and conflating paradigms. My preference is something like "functional core, imperative shell" or maybe "immediate-mode core, retained-mode shell" if that makes sense.

by cosmic_cheese5 hours ago|

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Yeah. Based on my personal experience I think some kind of hybrid of old-school imperative retained and declarative retained, both with granular reactivity is probably the correct balance for "serious" high-utility desktop applications. Declarative approaches are great for smaller components but become a nightmare for anything much more complex than a relatively simple mobile app while imperative requires a lot of extra legwork at the component level, and as I understand (which may be incorrect) immediate mode makes certain types of optimization more difficult.

by rootlocus2 hours ago|

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Is Tracy complicated enough? Because it's imgui.

https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy

by timhh59 minutes ago|

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That looks quite simple. Think about something like this, a commercial SystemVerilog simulator (this only shows a fraction of the UI).

https://blog.reds.ch/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/questa13.png

Or something like Visual Studio.

Obviously most GUIs are not nearly that complex so immediate mode can get you quite far. Its biggest limitation is that it makes it hard to do some layouts. Your GUI layout becomes dictated by your data dependencies which is quite awkward.

by well_ackshually41 minutes ago|

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Absolutely zero difficulty redoing this in a react style renderer. The only complexity is being careful with your data dependencies so as to not needlessly rerender.

Each pane is easily isolated, can share data with a view model scoped properly, etc. Writing it in an imperative toolkit is a "oops I forgot to update my data here" kind of hell. Data binding makes it slightly less worse

by hsn9155 hours ago|

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It's the only thing that can scale to complicated UI

by gen2brain4 hours ago|

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What does "scale"even mean in UI context? 10 or 100 controls in app makes difference how exactly? Retained apps redraw when needed, they are idle most of the times. How redrawing every frame helps to scale?

by well_ackshually35 minutes ago|

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This thread (and post) keeps mistaking immediate mode GUIs with declarative UIs. You can have declarative UIs that aren't immediate: the vast majority of them are, and they are idle most of the time.