[ausjke]

Very interesting. Just built it on ubuntu 16.04 smoothly, the only dependency is gtk-3.0.

What's the difference between libui and libsdl? The latter is also in C and supports many platforms. For large applications I may just use QT and for some embedded GUI I can use libsdl, what's the goal for libui?

[douche]

SDL is pretty barebones, if you want to build a UI with it. You've got to build up all your widgets yourself from scratch - rendering & compositing, handling input events, etc.

SDL really shines in simple cross-platform abstractions - window creation, basic rendering, input handling, threading, timers, basic audio, platform-agnostic file handling, etc. The older version (1.2) also had extensions for fonts, networking, and some other things, but I'm not sure if that applies for 2.0. Beats the snot out of messing with Win32 for getting started with game programming.

[FreeFull]

SDL 2 still has the _gfx, _image, _mixer, _net and _ttf extensions available. The only reason to still go with SDL 1.2 for anything new would be if you still want to target old, obscure platforms.

[maheart]

> What's the difference between libui and libsdl?

The way I understood it, libui is a widget toolkit (e.g. GTK, wxWidgets, Qt, etc) -- while SDL is low-level library to handle drawing, input (i.e. you'd need to implement your own widgets using the low-level primitives that are available to you).

[striking]

SDL isn't quite "lower-level"; it used to stand for Simple Directmedia Layer. It's a layer over some common drawing operations and the instantiation of a window.

So you get a box you can draw in, and that's it. Then you're allowed to poke pixels until you get what you want. It's not that you're poking a lower level (which would be akin to directly blitting to the screen buffer like an old-timey OS), it's that you're poking a different level (creating a new context and performing operations on it, via GDI+ or OpenGL or whatever). You trade one set of primitives for another.

[admax88q]

It's absolutely lower-level. How do you think those widgets get drawn in the end? Via primitive operations like GDI+/OpenGL or just bit blits.

GUI Widgets are a higher level of abstraction on top of pixels. SDL gives you pixels or an OpenGL context which gives you a slightly abstracted way of rendering pixels.

[ausjke]

Then if libui supports libsdl as it does to gtk-3.0 it would be nice, as gtk-3.0 is still quite heavy for many embedded systems.

libui is based on C, and it is not really suited to compete with the c++/java full GUIs on Desktops, so supporting libsdl will certainly expand its usage.