This project aims to generate go wrapper for Dear ImGui.

It comes with several default backends implemented.

It works on macOS(arm64/x86), windows(x64), Arch Linux (Gnome/KDE) and Fedora Workstation 36+, idealy other linux GUI should works as well. Check out examples: cd in and go run ..

There are several dependencies you might need to install on your linux machine. Take a look here

This module contains several packages that may need some explanation:

In order to make it easy in use, cimgui-go implemented a few imgui backends. All of them are placed in backend/ sub-packages. To see more details about usage of a specific backend, take a look at the examples.

We support the following backends:

• GLFW. (GLFW 3.3 + OpenGL)
• SDL2. (SDL 2 + OpenGL)
• Ebitengine (import "github.com/AllenDang/cimgui-go/backend/ebitenbackend").

• For functions, 'Im/ImGui/ig' is trimmed.
• Get prefix is also removed (with some exceptions).
• If function comes from imgui_internal.h, Internal prefix is added.

Unfortunately, in C there is no way to distinguish between a pointer and a slice. We had to bring this inconvenience to Go as well. Our code defaults to pointers, but you can easily convert your slice to a pointer by simply &(slice[0]).

Please note that at the moment (June 2025) go (1.24) does not support passing annonymous functions to C via CGO. We have a workaround - pre-generating large amount of global functions and a pool. For details see #224. Just be aware of the limitation that you may run out of pre-generated pool and experience a crash.

Currently most of the functions are generated, except memory related stuff (eg. memory allocator, storage management, etc...). If you find any function is missing, report an issue.

All kinds of contributions are welcome!

1. Use cimgui's lua generator to generate function and struct definition as json.
2. Generate proper go code from the definition (via manual crafted go program).
3. Use the backend implementation from imgui.
4. Use github workflow to compile cimgui, glfw and other C dependencies to static lib and place them in ./lib folder for further link.

Your contributions may apply to several areas:

A way the actual binding is generated. Such a modifications should be made in cmd/codegen module.

To actually generate Go binding, you need the following setup:

• Install GNU make
• You'll also need Go 😄

Then, just run make, or make XXX where XXX is the name of a package you want to generate (e.g. make imgui, make implot, etc.).

There are some files in the wrapper that have been hardcoded and are not auto-generated. These include (but are not limited to):

• imgui/extra_types.go
• imgui/extra_types.h
• imgui/clipboard.go

Same applies to the backend/ packages.

We have a special system to make it easier to update dependencies. In order to issue an update, do the following:

• Make sure you have luajit installed on your system.
• Run make update. This will take a while as it will redownload all dependencies and regenerate the whole C and Go bindings.
• Commit your changes and push them to GitHub.
• Execute cimgui compilation as described below:

As GitHub Actions are a bit slow sometimes, this might be useful to speed-up development process on your local machine. To pre-compile code locally, do the following:

• Make sure you have cmake as well as appropiate C/C++ toolchain installed on your system.
• Enter the lib directory.
• Run cmake -Bbuild .
• Then, cd build and run make -j$(nproc) to compile all imgui libraries.
• Copy cimgui.a to lib/<your operatign system>/<your architecture>/cimgui.a

To speed-up final Go build process, we pre-compile C/C++ libraries and place them in libs/ directory.

These libraries are:

• ImGui and all its plugins (implot, imnodes, e.t.c.)
• GLFW, SDL2 backend components.

This unfortunately means that some operating systems will not work out of the box. Currently, we compile against the following operating systems:

• macOS (arm64/x86_64)
• Windows (x86_64)
• Linux (x86_64)

If you run any system that is not listed above, you will need to compile the libraries yourself before using cimgui-go. Follow these instructions.. If you succeeded, please let us know by opening an issue (or a pull request) so we can try to add support for your system.