ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
https://imgui-bundle.pages.dev
It now also runs smoothly in the browser via pyodide: The playground below is a python app running in your browser (no server, no JavaScript). You can edit the code on the left and click Run. It even works on mobile.
https://imgui-bundle.pages.dev/playground
I have a strong interest in providing tools that help others express their creativity. This project aims to be a step in this direction as it helps develop GUIs where the code is extremely readable & hackable.
Some of the goals it addresses:
- Bring true Immediate Mode GUI to Python and C++
- A versatile range of high quality libraries: Widgets, Plots, Image Analysis, Node edition, markdown rendering
- Multiplatform apps in C++: works on all platform in C++ (desktop, mobile, emscripten)
- Deploy python apps to the web
- High quality python bindings that are always up-to-date (because they are auto-generated)
- Smooth transition between C++ and Python (same APIs for both)
I'd be happy to answer questions!
Discussion (11 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
For real world use I don't think its practical if its only goal is basic browser UX in Python versus JavaScript, but I can see amazing value in this for larger applications written in Python that need to make use of a Python GUI.
As an example, I once built an online stock/ticker app with it: smooth real-time updates in a nice plot. It would have been more complex with DOM based widgets (and probably less fun).
I like the idea a little bit. Mostly because I don't like javascript. So I say keep going for it, it could fill some niches.
I'm sure you know this, but the page takes like 30s to load on mobile. It wasn't a comfortable ux. Once it did load it seemed pretty fast though so kudos. Kind of gave me macromedia flash vibes from 2002.
Yes, the initial download of pyodide is about 5 MB. After that it is another 5MB for the bundle wheel.
But there is some hope: Based on test I just did, I see I did not setup headers so that the wheel and pyodide are cached in a browser (or in its fs): this could reduce reload times by a sizable factor.
Once loaded you can run at 60 FPS (or even 120 FPS depending on the browser's vsync).
As you can see in the playground: you can then switch from app to app instantly once pyodide is loaded and running. It almost feels like going from a page to another. You can see that when using the combobox to select example at the top right in the playground.
What I do not like is the strange mix of technologies you have to cope with in order to work with Python on the web: your project is often a mix of python / html / css / react / js / node.
Many very nice frameworks try to abstract this and present you only the python side; but they rely on this stack internally. Once you want to reach complex use cases (such as a refresh at reasonable rate), you will have to "open the engine" and enter into this mix.
There is a minimal amount of JavaScript just to download and run pyodide and then it is only Python: see example at
https://imgui-bundle.pages.dev/playground/?demo=p_35_minimal...