PanGui – A cross-platform UI library with a razor sharp focus on performance (pangui.io)

it is written in C# though they seem to have plans to create libraries for a variety of platforms. that said, there is no code or interactive demos available

These examples are in C#

https://pangui.io/#hello-world

but they claim it will be "language agnostic" and C++ is the next target, but maybe that just adds to the vagueness.

C, C++, C#, and probably Rust. There’s a section about that. There’s a link to the FAQ I. That section.

c#,c++,c,Rust,...

see the Language-agnostic section

This is the biggest red flag, they want to support a bunch of different platforms at once over just focusing on one or two

“All these examples are written in C#, and are created using our Win32 platform integration. As such, they are using an API that is idiomatic to C# and made to feel nice to use in specifically C#.

Keep in mind that PanGui is designed to be language-agnostic and will be transpiled to many languages, with C++ being the next target language. Where necessary, the user-facing API will always change to feel natural to use in the target language.”

Unsure if the whole thing transpiles or it’s C bindings with a transpiled shim. Either way, not having the source to inspect makes the package a tough sell to most here, I’d imagine.

On the FAQ, they point out that they don't know exactly what the licensing and pricing model will be, but that they intend to make it open source but also have a business model that supports development:

Look, we're going to level with you. We really don't know. We have two overriding priorities:

First, we want to put PanGui into the hands of as many people as possible and make it as accessible as possible. Second, we would prefer not to starve to death.

The extreme version of the first priority is making PanGui fully free and open source for anyone and everyone. The extreme version of the second priority is creating some pricing scheme where people have to pay us exorbitant fees just to glance briefly at an impressionist painting of the source code.

Clearly, neither will work out, so our goal is to strike some balance between these two extremes, preferably getting as close to the first one as possible. If you have any opinions or ideas, we would love to hear them.

Please tell us what to do As of this moment, we think PanGui is very likely to be some sort of open source, and hopefully the vast majority of people using it will never have to pay a dime. If we can make that work, we will.

I guess, because the problem they are addressing is acute.

So Unity’s own ui tools should suffice? Do they?

I think a lot of things end up at xkcd.com/927/

Sometimes its maybe about reinventing the wheel , sometimes people create micro optimization in their standards.

A UI library does not have the issue of standards; you can use it no matter what everyone else is using.

I recommend that they use open source + GPL. Then, offer commercial licenses that are not bound by GPL and offer support.

SDL is only a graphics framework in that it gives you a window, input events, and either a putpixel/blit functions or OpenGL. It does not have graphics primitives, like what used to be called "glut" in OpenGL itself (but supporting normal platforms, glut supported SGI Irix, BeOS and OS/2, but felt that Win32 was too niche to care about, and they never voluntarily cared about linux). Like even now it seems to think that this whole IOS and Android kerfuffle will blow over soon, not worth any effort.

SDL is like a (much better) glut that has sane platform support (and audio).

PanGUI gives you graphics primitives, nicely done and executed and seems to have a much saner selection of platforms (and also gives you audio), as well as supporting a great many languages to code in.

    > SDL is only a graphics framework in that it gives you a window, input events, and either a putpixel/blit functions or OpenGL.

Seems artificially constrained. The vast majority of devices today are >60fps.

Good GUIs are deceptively easy. Lines of text: font rendering is pretty difficult to begin with. But it gets harder when you want to match native platform look, handle different display sub pixel layouts or are dealing with a script that doesn’t fit into a font atlas. On top of that you get text layout which requires careful trade offs between performance and quality as well as a huge number of edge cases you need to handle. A couple lines of text is easy if it’s fixed layout, monospaced, ascii, but unless you are making dev tools that’s the exception not the norm. Images: there is a lot of complexity hidden in your image decoder, but even if you disregard that, you have to deal with proper caching and resizing to get good performance to manage vram constraints, handle different screen densities and smooth zooming. On top of that you might need to open the can of worms needed for hdr. Buttons: if you need buttons you probably also need a text input. Implementing text input in a way consistent with platform expectations, properly supporting IME and accessibility. There are a bunch of these more lightweight UI frameworks and they are great if you are building a terminal or a text editor. But for desktop or mobile software used by regular people you really need those millions of lines of code.