GGUI 0.1.8 Update

GGUI 0.1.8 Update

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Overview

Major restructuring and modernization of the project. Heaps of optimization and custom containers made for most optimal results.
Whole new styling system for more HTML/XML like styling and node tree construction.
Clipped off internal components from getting into auto generated header on export.
Since this update almost re-wrote the whole project many commits which focused on fixing issues, were about issues brought by the new re-write.

API Changes

• Input events now use IVector2 instead of Coordinate struct
• Many if not all classes are now written in lower camelCase
• Vector2 is now correctly named FVector2 for containing floating point coordinates
• GGUI::mouse is now an IVector2 type
• You can now give percentage floating point values for almost any value based styling, like width or color channel and so on...
  • You can use these as follows:

    element(
        width(100) | height(100) |   // set the parent element as 100x100
        node(new element(
            width(0.50f) | height(0.50f)    // this child element is now 50x50 and updates as its parents dimensions changes
        ))
    )

• GGUI does no longer have RGBA, instead opacity is given as a single floating value per element node
• RGB lerp can use Gamma color correct compute for much higher cost or use cheap simple lerp formula
  • You can configure this via the settings or via the cmd arg:

    enableGammaCorrection

  • GGUI accepts many of configurable settings at call time, via the args. GGUI removes hyphens so you can add single hyphen, double hyphen or no hyphens.
• Since most of the node structure is now given as an HTML/XML like, GGUI provides on_init() and other on() state change function handlers the user can customize
  • Since JS and other types of similar products use underscores for their on_* state handlers GGUI uses this naming convention as well.
• GGUI::Main is not accessible anymore, since it was moved under GGUI::INTERNAL::Main, and intended for user to access through GGUI::getRoot()
• Titles are now native to element class so window class was removed
• Pixel based canvas has been removed, since only terminal cell based canvas is needed
  • For pixel perfect canvas look up GGDirect for GGUI with DRM as backend support.
• Button class has been removed, since normal textField with on_click() brings out the same behavior
• SwitchBoxes have now singleSelect(true) like styling which disables all other marked switchBoxes in the same parent, giving user simple way to make single select choice lists
• Shadow styling has been removed, to be replaced later on with full shaders like customizations

Fixes

• Fixed where transparency wasn't propagated properly to transparent layers of text, not obtaining color from layers below

Optimizations

• To prevent unnecessary string concatenations GGUI implements its own string_view and string concatenation, these are called:
  • compactString: Holds as a std::variant either a char or a unicode letter
  • superString: Holds a predetermined list of compactStrings, capable of concatenating smaller superStrings to itself
  • The whole rendering pipeline is based on these two classes.
• Since GGUI has a varying and sometimes deeply nested functions of getters, many of them have been made constexpr to hopefully ease inlining and runtime
• To prevent weird std::vector behavior and total control in niche use case of it, GGUI now implements its own fastVector for more cache-like behavior between render passes

For Maintainers

• Added proper scripts for linux and windows side for init, build, export, test and benchmarking with various kinds of tools
• GGUI can take now -DGGUI_DEBUG, -DGGUI_RELEASE or -DGGUI_PROFILE, which are automatically managed via the meson build system, but could be manually set for fine control
  • Enabling -DGGUI_DEBUG, makes GGUI behave like --verbose in other programs.

Internal

• Added new multithread safety guard wrapper for:
  • Memory events
• Distributed to multithreading these following tasks:
  • Rendering pipeline
  • Memory and timed events handling
  • User input handling
• 0.1.8 introduces new internally used reportStacktrace(), which utilizes symbol table lookup and stack to print out helpful stacktraces
• GGUI utilizes some constexpr operator to default in all stylings, which is why GGUI currently only works on GCC v13 and higher and not in Clang!
• The GGUI lib now links statically with libc and libc++

Small additional notes

• GitHub Actions CI workflows
• New analytics & benchmarking scripts
  • ./bin/test.sh
  • ./bin/analytics/benchmark.sh
  • ./bin/analytics/time.sh 5 10 <- runs for 5 second and 10 seconds and displays the growth in opcode count.
• Examples in more structured sub folders
  • small <- single feature focused examples
  • medium <- feature combinatorial examples
  • large <- applicative examples
• Developer and contribution tooling (.github, guidelines)
• When you use the new styling position with percentages, note that the percentage already takes into account the parent.width or height minus the current node elements own width or height
  • For an example:

    element(
        width(100) | height(100) | 
    
        node(new element(
            width(10) | height(10) |
            position(STYLES::bottom + STYLES::left)     // This will force this element to be on the bottom left corner of the parent offset by the 10x10, so that it does not go out of bounds.
        ))
    )