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Learnings from creating a GUI library

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Sebastian Schöner

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Description

Learnings from creating a GUI library is a February 2026 blog post by Sebastian Schöner on building an immediate-mode GUI that meets a personal checklist of requirements.

Needs include a C interface, WASM, rich text and RTL, accessibility, and UI test automation. The design separates layout boxes, navigation spots, and draw shapes after Fleury-style immediate-mode ideas. Lessons cover keyboard navigation edge cases, layered data instead of monolithic boxes, tiled SDF command-buffer rendering with complexity-based shaders, and Skribidi for text.

It is for intermediate systems and UI programmers writing custom immediate-mode libraries.

The piece is a free essay with screenshots and architecture notes, not a released library package.

It is useful as a candid postmortem on abstraction boundaries and GPU UI performance tactics.