I wonder how long till they pivot away from this belief. I feel like everyone in UI goes through this phase as some point, but in the end it doesn't scale to truly complicated UI
Admittedly I'm simplifying too much and conflating paradigms. My preference is something like "functional core, imperative shell" or maybe "immediate-mode core, retained-mode shell" if that makes sense.
https://blog.reds.ch/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/questa13.png
Or something like Visual Studio.
Obviously most GUIs are not nearly that complex so immediate mode can get you quite far. Its biggest limitation is that it makes it hard to do some layouts. Your GUI layout becomes dictated by your data dependencies which is quite awkward.
Each pane is easily isolated, can share data with a view model scoped properly, etc. Writing it in an imperative toolkit is a "oops I forgot to update my data here" kind of hell. Data binding makes it slightly less worse
I would not classify a react style renderer as "immediate mode". It has aesthetic similarities with IM GUIs, but ultimately there is a fully retained tree under the hood, that gets diffed/mutated on every update
No.
It means that you build the UI by describing what it should look like now, based on the data / state you own, without referencing any existing "widget" object or trying to manipulate it.
Scale is not about the number of buttons, but the structure of the data.
You have a list of objects, within each objects you have several fields, some of them lists, some of them maps. within some of those sub-items you have other lists and maps, nested arbitrarily.
This would be hell to manage for a retained mode UI. You have to mirror the application data into a widget tree and keep all the elements in sync, all the way down to the arbitrary depths of it.
You'd be writing thousands of lines of code that do nothing but keep your data in sync with widget states. You'd have many one off bugs where one sub field fails to sync in some scenarios. Your only options is to be more defensive: more events, more full-resync. As a result, the codebase is complicated and the application feels slow/heavy, because updating widget states is costly.
In immediate mode, none of that matters. You don't have a parallel widget tree.
No, instead, you need to have your entire dataset in memory, and potentially rebuild your whole tree on every update. This causes quite a lot of problems for out-of-core datasets - you end up needing to maintain proxies for things like items in scrollable lists that aren't loaded into memory yet.
Are we talking about displaying tables with billions of entries? I'd like you to show me how retained mode gui scales well with that use case.