[sneusse]

Battery life is a weird way to compare these technologies. It does not matter if you dispatch your draw calls or the retained mode framework does it for you - if you have new data to draw every frame then _somebody_ has to do it.

I do ship an IM GUI application to a small group of users and they will not know or care, as long as it does the job it needs to do. What made me choose this approach: I do not need another language/technology for my UI. Composition of the UI is done like I compose code: using functions/objects. I could see this approach failing on bigger projects or when you would have a dedicated designer doing the UI/UX stuff. As long as only programmers are working on the project I think it's fine and quite easy to understand for others what's going on in the 'UI code'.