I’m working on a reading list for myself on Immediate Mode GUIs (mostly) in Rust. Below are some loosely organized links & resources I’ve found thus far! Feel free to share more links and I’ll take a look!

Design

• About the IMGUI Paradigm - Dear ImGui Wiki - Explains how UI state lives in your code rather than hidden in the library
• Immediate-Mode Graphical User Interfaces (2005) - Casey Muratori - The original blog post that coined “IMGUI”
• Why is UI in Rust So Hard? - Warp Dev - Challenges of Rust’s memory safety rules with traditional GUI patterns

Managing State

• Keyboard Focus & Event Routing - Niklas Gray - Implementing focus and input handling without persistent widget objects
• State Handling Advantages - No duplicate state between UI and application, eliminating complex observer patterns

Reflections

• Dear ImGui Wiki & FAQs - Omar Cornut - Common questions and design trade-offs in IMGUI libraries
• Ownership and data flow in GPUI - via Nathan Sobo
• Xilem: an architecture for UI in Rust - via Raph Levien

Performance Techniques for Fast Frames

• Batched Rendering - Grouping geometry by texture/material to minimize draw calls
• Caching and Partial Updates - Raph Levien - Recording display lists and reusing vertex buffers across frames

Metal & Graphics

• 2D Graphics on Modern GPU- via Raph Levien
• 3 Years of Metal Retrospective - Arseny Kapoulkine - Experience porting a renderer to Metal on iOS/macOS (please write somewhere other than medium!)
• Fast 2D Graphics on the GPU - via Raph Levien
• Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS - via Antonio Scandurra
• Optimizing the Metal pipeline to maintain 120 FPS in GPUI - via Nathan Sobo & Antonio Scandurra
• Using Metal and Rust to make FFT even faster - LambdaClass - Using Rust with Apple’s Metal API via metal-rs bindings

Native macOS APIs

• objc2: Calling macOS APIs from Rust with objc2 - (lib) Active Rust bindings for Objective-C runtime
• Rust API Bindings: Core Foundation Memory Management and Mutability - via Always Processing - Wrapping Core Foundation and Cocoa APIs in safe Rust