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Dear ImGui VS IUP Portable User Interface

Compare Dear ImGui VS IUP Portable User Interface and see what are their differences

Dear ImGui logo Dear ImGui

Dear ImGui: Bloat-free Graphical User interface for C++ with minimal dependencies

IUP Portable User Interface logo IUP Portable User Interface

IUP is a multi-platform toolkit for building graphical user interfaces.
  • Dear ImGui Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-28
Not present

Dear ImGui features and specs

  • Immediate Mode GUI
    Dear ImGui uses an immediate mode paradigm, allowing for flexible and intuitive GUI creation where widgets can be created and managed on the fly during each frame's render loop.
  • Lightweight
    Dear ImGui is designed to be lightweight and does not require heavy dependencies or intricate setup, making it easy to integrate into existing projects.
  • Cross-Platform
    It supports multiple platforms including Windows, macOS, Linux, and various game consoles, offering a versatile solution for different development environments.
  • Customizable and Extendable
    Dear ImGui allows developers to customize its appearance and behavior, supporting themes, custom rendering, and integration with various backends.
  • Active Community and Extensive Documentation
    It's backed by an active community and well-documented, offering plenty of examples, tutorials, and third-party tools to help developers get started and solve issues.

Possible disadvantages of Dear ImGui

  • Limited Styling
    While Dear ImGui provides basic customization options, it lacks extensive support for complex styling and advanced UI designs compared to some retained mode GUI libraries.
  • Performance Overhead
    Due to its immediate mode nature, Dear ImGui can introduce performance overhead in complex or resource-constrained applications, since UI elements are recreated every frame.
  • Lower-Level API
    Dear ImGui operates at a lower level as compared to some higher-level retained mode GUI libraries, requiring more manual management and potentially more boilerplate code for complex interfaces.
  • Primarily Developer-Oriented
    The library is designed with developers in mind, making it less suitable for end-user applications that require polished and feature-rich interfaces.
  • Lack of Features for Comprehensive Applications
    Dear ImGui is excellent for tools, debugging, and small applications, but it lacks some advanced features and controls needed for building comprehensive, full-scale applications.

IUP Portable User Interface features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

Analysis of Dear ImGui

Overall verdict

  • Dear ImGui is a very good option for developers who need immediate-mode GUI components that are easy to implement and maintain. Its flexibility, ease of use, and performance make it a solid choice for numerous applications, especially in games and real-time simulations.

Why this product is good

  • Dear ImGui is highly regarded for its simplicity, efficiency, and the ability to quickly create graphical interfaces in C++ applications. It is lightweight, easy to integrate, and has a permissive MIT license that makes it suitable for both open-source and commercial projects. It excels in scenarios where rapid prototyping is required, offering an intuitive API and a vast array of widgets. The library is actively maintained, and has a strong community that contributes to its continuous improvement and support.

Recommended for

    Game developers, tool developers, and anyone involved in real-time applications or rapid prototyping. It's particularly useful for developers looking to add complex yet lightweight GUIs to their projects with minimal code overhead.

Dear ImGui videos

Dear ImGui -- C++ GUI Framework For AAA Games and Game Engines

More videos:

  • Review - CppCon 2016: Nicolas Guillemot “Dear imgui,"

IUP Portable User Interface videos

No IUP Portable User Interface videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Dear ImGui and IUP Portable User Interface)
IDE
94 94%
6% 6
Rapid Application Development
Game Engine
100 100%
0% 0
Development Tools
71 71%
29% 29

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Dear ImGui seems to be a lot more popular than IUP Portable User Interface. While we know about 163 links to Dear ImGui, we've tracked only 1 mention of IUP Portable User Interface. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Dear ImGui mentions (163)

  • Ask HN: What are good high information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)
    I find the imgui UIs to be very high density (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui. It seems the game dev community has pretty powerful tools to understand and interrogate their work. - Source: Hacker News / 28 days ago
  • Lumix - a .NET open source ableton like DAW
    The user interface has been entirely developed using immediate mode gui dear-imgui library, with the ImGui.NET wrapper. This allows for a fast and bloat free experience but, at the same time, harder customization for a task of this size, since the library isn't really suited to the development of end-user applications. On the other side, it's what I'm most familiar to work with. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • What do you think about using a game engine for UI?
    I've recently had a lot of fun/success with Dear ImGui (C++) -- not a game engine, but originally/partly meant for use in them. https://github.com/ocornut/imgui. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Microui+fenster=Small GUI
    Cool project! Graphics programming is _hard_ and anything to make it easier is welcome. Maybe a dumb question, but why not Imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui). "It's way too big and complex" is a completely reasonable answer, but I found it fantastic for debug menus, and there are a few applications that have used it as their _main_ GUI (Ship of Harkinian as an... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • Building cross-platform GUI apps in Rust using egui
    The most well known immediate mode GUI framework, which egui is also inspired by, is Dear imgui. The egui repository also has a section on the trade offs when it comes to immediate mode GUIs, which I would definitely recommend you check out. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
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IUP Portable User Interface mentions (1)

  • cross platform GUI toolkit?
    As C libraries, I can recommend IUP. You can also choose immediate mode which has the same look on all platforms, there are some wrappers around imgui in Zig like zig-upaya. Source: almost 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Dear ImGui and IUP Portable User Interface, you can also consider the following products

GTK - GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

wxWidgets - wxWidgets: Cross-Platform GUI Library

Qt - Powerful, flexible and easy to use, Qt will help you not only meet your tight deadline, but also reduce the maintainable code by an astonishing percentage.

WompMobile - WompMobile offers tow kind of functions – first creating new mobile apps and secondly converting the websites into mobile applications.

FLTK - Fast Light Toolkit - Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK)

OutSystems - Build Enterprise-Grade Apps Fast.