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Many people at a certain point in their careers become infatuated with the idea of making a "small", "simple", and "opinionated" component free from legacy "BS"

Many people at a certain point in their careers become infatuated with the idea of making a "small", "simple", and "opinionated" component free from legacy "BS". They have the skill to implement the core of that component but lack the wisdom and humility to understand that the "BS" complexity exists for good reasons, that their "small" component is subject to those reasons, and that they haven't actually found a fundamentally better approach that avoids the "BS", but merely skipped the hard parts of software engineering. You just have to let people go through this phase. You should nod, smile, and compliment them on the economy of their vision. This phase hones skills people need for more serious endeavors. Butt God help you if you actually use one of these "small" systems in production!

throwaway684936 5y ago
Immediate mode is generally used for quick and dirty developer tools. It's rarely used for user-facing UI. You're free to waste your time carefully architecting an MVC application any time you want a few text boxes and sliders to fiddle with something. Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Valve, Id, Blizzard, Ubisoft will continue to use immediate mode where they deem it useful, in spite of your advice.
astrobe_ 5y ago
Apparently you know the feeling when a competitor comes up and do 80% of what you're doing for half the cost (in dev time, memory weight, etc.). Hell, it still feels unfair even when it's a coworker who gets tasked with redoing (usually using some trendy new stuff) the system you've been maintaining for so long and know by heart, and that you've dreamed to rewrite for an equally long time. You comfort yourself by saying they will run into the same problems that just wait their time in a dark corners of software or hardware. But they generally are in a much better position, with their smaller and simpler software, to deal with it than with old software.
AussieWog93 5y ago
What your heuristic may be accurate in the general sense, it's absolutely not the case for ImGUIs. I've used the technology on a real commercial product before and it was vastly superior to the old way of doing things. The "BS" complexity of retained-mode GUIs, as you suggested, is not really BS but the logical result of using a client/server model. That said, for the average desktop application (where all necessary state is local to the user's own machine) this model really is a poor fit and ImGUIs shine. A lot of the evangelism comes from the fact that many more conservative devs still insist on using the more complex client/server retained-mode paradigm, even when immediate-mode is more suitable to the task at hand.

throwaway684936 5y ago

Immediate mode is generally used for quick and dirty developer tools. It's rarely used for user-facing UI. You're free to waste your time carefully architecting an MVC application any time you want a few text boxes and sliders to fiddle with something. Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Valve, Id, Blizzard, Ubisoft will continue to use immediate mode where they deem it useful, in spite of your advice.

astrobe_ 5y ago

Apparently you know the feeling when a competitor comes up and do 80% of what you're doing for half the cost (in dev time, memory weight, etc.). Hell, it still feels unfair even when it's a coworker who gets tasked with redoing (usually using some trendy new stuff) the system you've been maintaining for so long and know by heart, and that you've dreamed to rewrite for an equally long time. You comfort yourself by saying they will run into the same problems that just wait their time in a dark corners of software or hardware. But they generally are in a much better position, with their smaller and simpler software, to deal with it than with old software.

AussieWog93 5y ago

What your heuristic may be accurate in the general sense, it's absolutely not the case for ImGUIs. I've used the technology on a real commercial product before and it was vastly superior to the old way of doing things. The "BS" complexity of retained-mode GUIs, as you suggested, is not really BS but the logical result of using a client/server model. That said, for the average desktop application (where all necessary state is local to the user's own machine) this model really is a poor fit and ImGUIs shine. A lot of the evangelism comes from the fact that many more conservative devs still insist on using the more complex client/server retained-mode paradigm, even when immediate-mode is more suitable to the task at hand.