Most GUI systems use change events, dirty rectangles, and explicit data models [1] to synchronize state. These increase runtime efficiency at the cost of duplicate state and boilerplate code, which made sense 30 years ago. Today, real-time interactive programs like games and CAD run on fast machines. Conserving GUI computation at the expense of code complexity is now a poor tradeoff.

We created a new GPU-efficient, themed extension to Barrett's Immediate Mode GUIs. Ours has a stateless data model where universal pointers directly connect application variables to controls. For example, there is no "checkbox.getValue()"; instead, a checkbox is bound to a boolean variable at creation. This eliminates most events. To further eliminate boilerplate, we automatically manage GUI memory and layout. In terms of Model-View-Controller, we have a transparent model, a smart controller , and a very fast view. These simple changes make an API remarkably easier than MFC, Swing, and WxWidgets while naturally integrating with 3D rendering.

@misc{mcguire2008gui,
 author = {Morgan Mc{G}uire},
 title = {{GUI}s for Real-Time Programs, using Universal Pointers},
 note = {SIGGRAPH '08: ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 posters},
 year = {2008},
 location = {Los Angeles, CA}
 }