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Comment by paulshen | Hacker News Reader

I investigated egui early this year. It's a very good library! For me, getting used to immediate mode UI was a change from being used to DOM / React-style UI. imgui works well for a lot but it struggles with complex layouts, eg flexbox. This is acknowledged in egui's README

Couple things I built with egui: https://artifacts.bypaulshen.com/rust-gui/code-render/ https://artifacts.bypaulshen.com/rust-gui/tictactoe/

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Could you possible share the source to your two examples? I'd love to see how much is accidental complexity vs actual complexity, compared to how web UIs (and other similar paradigms) can be built almost in an almost fully declarative way.

Here's the main file of the tictactoe implementation.

https://gist.github.com/paulshen/b04db68c754f73e693cd29a481c...

`update` is similar to React's render function except here it's being called on every interaction (eg mousemove tick) and redrawing the entire screen from scratch! The code runs so fast that this is fine from a perf standpoint. Note that egui has a reactive or continuous mode. You can rerender everything from scratch 60fps (continuous mode) and it'd be fine in most cases.

Part of what makes the DOM slower by comparison is the fact that it supports such advanced, declarative, adaptive layouts. There's a tradeoff for having that vs not having that

Tic-tac-toe is frustrating me because I can't seem to force it into a draw.

I tried to make it win every time and I'm wondering whether given a Tic-tac-toe opponent that does random moves, it is always possible to play such that your opponent always wins.

No such strategy could exist because if it did, if your opponent randomly implemented the same strategy then it would force itself to lose

Good point! I guess the difference is whether it exists for the player that does the second move.

The tic tac toe is easily defeated

Did you read the text at the bottom of the page?

Don't try too hard. The "AI" makes random moves.

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