nuklear
It’s been two weeks since my last blog post and I’ve released my second CHICKEN egg! Like the previous one, it’s a wrapper for a GUI library, albeit a hugely different one as it follows the immediate mode (as opposed to the retained mode) approach. This design decision resulted in a number of differences:
- Very little hidden state
- No caching involved, all widgets are redrawn at each frame
- The UI is heavily integrated into your program and builds upon its data
- No callbacks, widgets that can be triggered return interesting values instead
- It becomes ridiculously simple to create custom widgets
- It’s trivial to add custom behavior to widgets
For examples of the last two, see the calendar widget, the password input box and the user-customizable layouts in the overview demo. Reimplementing these in a traditional UI toolkit would have been considerably harder, if not even impossible. Now consider the challenge of implementing a GUI editor. With this approach it is a matter of creating new data structures on demand that get rendered as widgets and represent their internal state, then save it to disk when asked to. I find this way of thinking incredibly liberating and would recommend anyone to give it a try, even if just in the form of a data-driven game.
Unlike with the kiwi egg, I had to step up my C binding skills. My old trick to use helper functions that stack-allocate data, then invoke the real function, did not work as they needed to live across multiple function calls. Instead I learned that one can use blobs as storage managed from Scheme and use a locative to it for work from C. As long as one doesn’t do funny things like using the results as hash table keys anywhere it works surprisingly well. Other than that I’ve used the C API here and there to pass around Scheme values that were impossible to represent directly with the FFI.
The greatest problem I’ve encountered was a lack of documentation. Fortunately I’ve figured out everything necessary myself, but I still have the impression that I’m missing out on something. I hope to get in contact with upstream regarding the bugs I ran into, otherwise I’ll have to give dear imgui a try…