PanGui – A cross-platform UI library with a razor sharp focus on performance

SDL is only a graphics framework in that it gives you a window, input events, and either a putpixel/blit functions or OpenGL. It does not have graphics primitives, like what used to be called "glut" in OpenGL itself (but supporting normal platforms, glut supported SGI Irix, BeOS and OS/2, but felt that Win32 was too niche to care about, and they never voluntarily cared about linux). Like even now it seems to think that this whole IOS and Android kerfuffle will blow over soon, not worth any effort.

SDL is like a (much better) glut that has sane platform support (and audio).

PanGUI gives you graphics primitives, nicely done and executed and seems to have a much saner selection of platforms (and also gives you audio), as well as supporting a great many languages to code in.

Seems artificially constrained. The vast majority of devices today are >60fps.

“All these examples are written in C#, and are created using our Win32 platform integration. As such, they are using an API that is idiomatic to C# and made to feel nice to use in specifically C#.

Keep in mind that PanGui is designed to be language-agnostic and will be transpiled to many languages, with C++ being the next target language. Where necessary, the user-facing API will always change to feel natural to use in the target language.”

Unsure if the whole thing transpiles or it’s C bindings with a transpiled shim. Either way, not having the source to inspect makes the package a tough sell to most here, I’d imagine.

These examples are in C#

https://pangui.io/#hello-world

but they claim it will be "language agnostic" and C++ is the next target, but maybe that just adds to the vagueness.

C, C++, C#, and probably Rust. There’s a section about that. There’s a link to the FAQ I. That section.

it is written in C# though they seem to have plans to create libraries for a variety of platforms. that said, there is no code or interactive demos available

c#,c++,c,Rust,...

see the Language-agnostic section

This is the biggest red flag, they want to support a bunch of different platforms at once over just focusing on one or two

So Unity’s own ui tools should suffice? Do they?

I think a lot of things end up at xkcd.com/927/

Sometimes its maybe about reinventing the wheel , sometimes people create micro optimization in their standards.

I recommend that they use open source + GPL. Then, offer commercial licenses that are not bound by GPL and offer support.

On the FAQ, they point out that they don't know exactly what the licensing and pricing model will be, but that they intend to make it open source but also have a business model that supports development:

Look, we're going to level with you. We really don't know. We have two overriding priorities:

First, we want to put PanGui into the hands of as many people as possible and make it as accessible as possible. Second, we would prefer not to starve to death.

The extreme version of the first priority is making PanGui fully free and open source for anyone and everyone. The extreme version of the second priority is creating some pricing scheme where people have to pay us exorbitant fees just to glance briefly at an impressionist painting of the source code.

Clearly, neither will work out, so our goal is to strike some balance between these two extremes, preferably getting as close to the first one as possible. If you have any opinions or ideas, we would love to hear them.

Please tell us what to do As of this moment, we think PanGui is very likely to be some sort of open source, and hopefully the vast majority of people using it will never have to pay a dime. If we can make that work, we will.

I guess, because the problem they are addressing is acute.