Wookash Podcast Dear ImGui | On UI Architecture with Omar Cornut
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Nov 8, 2025 Omar Cornut, a software engineer and the creator of Dear ImGui, shares his journey from learning BASIC to developing an innovative UI library widely used in game dev. He discusses the importance of hands-on learning versus formal education, and how immediate-mode GUI design speeds up development. Omar explains the differences between IMGUI and Dear ImGui, the challenges of maintaining stability, and the rich ecosystem of language bindings. He also reveals exciting future plans for enhanced styling and a new text editor, emphasizing performance and pragmatism in API design.
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Start Simple To Prototype Fast
- You can implement a simple immediate-mode UI with a few widgets in an afternoon to prototype tools quickly.
- But note the trap: a toy IMGUI often becomes a long-term maintenance project if adopted widely.
Keeping The UI Purposefully Plain
- Omar intentionally keeps ImGui visually plain to reduce onboarding friction and let programmers iterate fast.
- He explains that making the UI pretty adds friction like icon design and slows feature addition.
Favor Good Defaults Over Excessive Options
- Design APIs so common cases are simple and use good defaults instead of exposing many low-level knobs.
- Group infrequent style parameters into global stacks and reserve per-call parameters for frequently changing values.
