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Comment by piker

6 months ago

Hmm. It seems to me that one of the features of an immediate mode library is that if you don't call something, you won't suffer overhead consequences. If you aren't trying to align things in a manner that triggers the two-pass rendering, then you shouldn't be affected by the associated performance hit.

I guess you worry that the feature creep dilutes the maintainers' focus, but opening it up to a broader audience might get access to more contributors.

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piker

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Animats  6 months ago

> I guess you worry that the feature creep dilutes the maintainers' focus, but opening it up to a broader audience might get access to more contributors.

To some extent, yes. Here's an example.[1] So many features have been added that the unit tests were taking too long. So tests were switched to use a faster allocator. That won't even compile for cross-compilation from Linux to Windows.

Because tests won't run, chasing down other cross-compilation bugs got much harder.[2]

This is the price of feature bloat. Core stuff is breaking and not getting fixed as cool features are bolted on. Currently, 799 open bugs. The technical debt is building up.

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/7033

[2] https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/6847

  • bunderbunder  6 months ago

    It reminds me a little bit of the inescapable lifecycle of a ticketing system:

      1. People love it because it's lightweight and fast.
  2. More and more people use it.
  3. Feature requests start to roll in.
  4. It becomes bloated and slow.
  5. People get fed up and start to hate it.
  6. Create a new ticketing system and return to step 1.

    • diggan  6 months ago

      Maybe we should just learn to live with that sort of things, and build a tool/product that works with that cycle in mind and offers it as a feature.

      1 reply →

Animats  6 months ago

Two-pass rendering was considered and rejected by the Egui developer. What they have is sort of one and a half pass rendering. Sometimes, things are wrong on the first draw, but correct on the next draw because info is retained from the previous frame.

Back in 2023, this created a bug where a text box was misaligned on alternate frames.[1] Amusingly, I tried to capture a video of this, and the 30 FPS video looked perfect, because it was capturing only alternate frames of 60 FPS refresh.

Bugs in layout can be very strange in Egui.

[1] https://github.com/emilk/egui/issues/2810