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odin-dear-imgui

f25cce3binding

Odin wrapper to Dear Imgui

3Open repo
No license · updated 4 months ago

odin-dear-imgui

Odin bindings for Dear ImGui v1.92.6-docking, generated via odin-c-bindgen on top of Dear Bindings — a C header generator that wraps the Dear ImGui C++ API into a clean C API (dcimgui.h / dcimgui_internal.h).

The generated Odin package lives in imgui/ under the package name ImGui.

Features

  • Full bindings for the public Dear ImGui API (dcimgui.h) and internal API (dcimgui_internal.h)
  • Docking branch support (IMGUI_HAS_DOCK)
  • Backend bindings for GLFW (platform) and Vulkan (renderer)
  • Cross-platform: Windows, Linux, macOS, WASM
  • Idiomatic Odin: Im/ImGui prefixes stripped, flag enums converted to bit_set, and many types remapped to native Odin equivalents including generic types such as Vector, Span, Pool, ChunkStream, and StableVector

Prerequisites

Odin

A recent Odin nightly is recommended.

STB vendor libraries

The package links against several STB libraries that ship with Odin but must be compiled before first use:

make -C "<ODIN_ROOT>/vendor/stb/src"

This produces stb_truetype, stb_rect_pack, and stb_sprintf — all required by Dear ImGui.

Pre-compiled Dear ImGui static library

A compiled Dear ImGui static library must be present in the imgui/ folder. The expected file names are:

OS Architecture File name
Windows x64 imgui_windows_x64.lib
Windows arm64 imgui_windows_arm64.lib
Linux x64 imgui_linux_x64.a
Linux arm64 imgui_linux_arm64.a
macOS x64 imgui_darwin_x64.a
macOS arm64 imgui_darwin_arm64.a

A pre-built imgui_windows_x64.lib is included. For other platforms you will need to compile Dear ImGui yourself and place the resulting library in imgui/.

⚠️ imconfig.h must match — see the Compiling the ImGui library section below.

Usage

Import the imgui/ directory as a package in your project:

import imgui "path/to/imgui"

Backends

Backend bindings live in sub-packages:

Backend Sub-package path
GLFW imgui/glfw
Vulkan imgui/vulkan

ImGui provides more example backends that haven't been included here. If you would like to rewrite one of these backends into Odin and add it to this binding feel free to create a PR.

Compiling the ImGui library

When compiling Dear ImGui into a static library, you must compile it with the same imconfig.h that lives in headers/imconfig.h. This file controls compile-time options that affect data structure layouts and ABI. If the library is compiled with different settings than those used when the bindings were generated, you could get silent memory corruption or crashes at runtime.

The active non-default settings in headers/imconfig.h that are particularly important are:

Define Effect
IMGUI_DISABLE_OBSOLETE_FUNCTIONS Removes deprecated API — affects available symbols
IMGUI_DISABLE_DEFAULT_ALLOCATORS Removes default malloc/free — you must call ImGui.SetAllocatorFunctions()
IMGUI_USE_STB_SPRINTF Switches the internal formatter to stb_sprintf
IMGUI_DISABLE_STB_TRUETYPE_IMPLEMENTATION Uses the external STB truetype library instead of the embedded copy
IMGUI_DISABLE_STB_RECT_PACK_IMPLEMENTATION Uses the external STB rect_pack library instead of the embedded copy
IMGUI_DISABLE_STB_SPRINTF_IMPLEMENTATION Uses the external STB sprintf library instead of the embedded copy
IMGUI_ENABLE_WIN32_DEFAULT_IME_FUNCTIONS Links against imm32 on Windows for IME support

Regenerating / Updating the Bindings

The Odin bindings are generated from the C headers in headers/ using odin-c-bindgen, configured by the two SJSON files at the project root.

Config file Input header Output
dcimgui.sjson headers/dcimgui.h imgui/dcimgui.odin
dcimgui_internal.sjson headers/dcimgui_internal.h imgui/dcimgui_internal.odin

Steps to update to a new ImGui version

  1. Download the latest docking-branch C headers from the Dear Bindings releases page — grab the AllBindingFiles.zip for the docking variant.
  2. Replace headers/dcimgui.h and headers/dcimgui_internal.h with the new files.
  3. Review any changes to imconfig.h in the new Dear ImGui release. If you need to update headers/imconfig.h, you must also recompile the Dear ImGui static library (see Compiling the ImGui library).
  4. Recompile the Dear ImGui static library using the updated sources and the headers/imconfig.h from this repo, then place the result in imgui/.
  5. Re-run odin-c-bindgen with dcimgui.sjson and dcimgui_internal.sjson.
  6. Review any new types, functions, or flags that may need to be added to the SJSON configs.

⚠️ Important — check the include in dcimgui_internal.h

After replacing headers/dcimgui_internal.h with a freshly downloaded file, open it and check whether it contains:

#include "imgui.h"

If it does, replace it with:

#include "dcimgui.h"

The bindgen tool parses the C API headers, not the original C++ ones. Without this fix, parsing dcimgui_internal.h will produce errors.

License

  • Dear ImGui — MIT license (see backends/LICENSE.txt)
  • Dear Bindings — MIT license (see headers/LICENSE.txt)