10 years of Dear ImGui

I haven't had time to finish this yet, but I wanted to quote some interesting bits I've found so far:

I would guess that perhaps ~50% of both small and AAA games built using custom in-house engines are using Dear ImGui in some capacity (e.g. Assassin's Creed, Clash of Clans, GTA 6, many high profile Nintendo titles etc.). I am seeing slowly increasing adoption in large teams using Unreal Engine as well.

I keep reminding myself that with every duplicate question/answer we tend to make a step toward having the information more readily findable.

I think this is a great attitude that's surprisingly and unfortunately rare in technical communities. Perhaps it's a leftover attitude from "the before times", when search engines weren't so widely used to find answers to questions and errors? I think today the value of "reposts" in this context is underestimated though. Not to mention, if a bunch of people keep having to ask the same question, or keep posting the same error, that itself is an indication of "hurdles" in the documentation or design.

A few years ago, I caved to recurrent requests to open a Discord.
My conclusion to the Discord experiment was that:

• Answers were of poorer quality
• Good answers were lost in the noise.
• Good conversation was difficult.
• Information is hard to search.
• Interesting problems have not surfaced to me.

I thought it was detrimental to information quality, to the community and to the software itself.
In early 2021, I decided to close the Discord server (1900+ users), fully embracing GitHub issues as a central point to gather and search for information.

I believe what people want out of a system like Discord is to be allowed to ask questions with less effort, but in my experience we always end up requiring extra information and doing unnecessary back and forth.

I also tried using a Discourse forum, and taking advantage of GitHub Discussions.
None of them seemed to provide value over discussing in a centralized location.
My main and only issue with GitHub Issues is... the fact that the tab is called “Issues”. Some people may be discouraged to ask certain types of questions there.

Help doesn't always come from the bigger players:

• Some smaller companies may be intimidated seeing big names in sponsors list and think they can't meaningfully help.
• Some lone individuals contributed more than some multi-billion companies!
• Guess which of the two are making press releases and blog posts about their contribution?
  • I will very happily accept $250 from an individual who can afford it.
  • But not from a trillion-dollar company using this as part of a blog post about OSS support.
  • If you are a victim of some trillion-dollar company offering you $250, please politely refuse it (cough) and try to engage in obtaining better from them (or nothing).

Something something universal basic income something something national open source developer fund something something