>general purpose cross-platform application UI development
because of the immediate mode paradigm it's not really a general purpose framework. The constant redrawing is just a complete resource hog in non real-time applications. The reason other graphics frameworks retain internal state (which Imgui exactly avoids) is to only redraw components when necessary. In theory you could write yourself some sort of widget state manager on top of it but then you've just reinvented react or Qt or what have you.
It's so popular in games and real time visualization because that's one of the domains where you redraw constantly anyway.
You don't need to have a constant redraw and IMGUI libraries do keep internal state. In fact both of these are explicitly mentioned in the linked article:
> IMGUI does not mean that the library doesn't retain data.
> IMGUI does not mean it needs a continuous loop nor need to refresh continuously.
because of the immediate mode paradigm it's not really a general purpose framework. The constant redrawing is just a complete resource hog in non real-time applications. The reason other graphics frameworks retain internal state (which Imgui exactly avoids) is to only redraw components when necessary. In theory you could write yourself some sort of widget state manager on top of it but then you've just reinvented react or Qt or what have you.
It's so popular in games and real time visualization because that's one of the domains where you redraw constantly anyway.