I've always enjoyed making little apps with Immediate mode GUIs. It's a shame that they aren't as effective as retained GUIs for more complex apps.
When I was still programming in Rust FLTK was the only GUI I used that both worked on my Raspberry Pi 4 and was something I felt like I could grasp. I'm not sure if that is retained or immediate or not. I wish the OS maintainers would all get their act together and create an api that made creating cross platform GUIs easier. You can't blame people for using Electron when you see the state of desktop GUIs
Itβs, from my experience, the sanest of all toolkits - much easier and simpler to use than almost any other, for 98% of tasks, and usually faster. Back in 1998(!) when I started using it, it was also the only flicker free one for Windows and X (without very significant effort) although I believe that gap was finally closed circa 2008 or so.
Layout becomes challenging after a certain point with ImGUI. Especially if your layout "flows" based on the state of existing elements. This can require multiple draw passes in ImGUI to get certain effects and outcomes.
When I was still programming in Rust FLTK was the only GUI I used that both worked on my Raspberry Pi 4 and was something I felt like I could grasp. I'm not sure if that is retained or immediate or not. I wish the OS maintainers would all get their act together and create an api that made creating cross platform GUIs easier. You can't blame people for using Electron when you see the state of desktop GUIs
1. https://github.com/fltk/fltk