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vurtun
nuklear
C2016–2022
vurtun / nuklear · Archived

nuklear

A single-header ANSI C gui library

23Distinct people
28Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
14KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A single-header ANSI C gui library

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 8:59:20 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year28 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-04-18 19:22:06 UTC to 2022-09-05 21:26:27 UTC.

02468102016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2022

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Nuklear ALL DEVELOPMENT MOVED ELSEWHERE Dear visitor, this repository, issue tracker, etc. is abandoned in favor of https://github.com/Immediate-Mode-UI/Nuklear . Any activity in this issue tracker, any pull requests, etc. will be ignored. Looking forward to hearing from you in https://github.com/Immediate-Mode-UI/Nuklear Nuklear community This is a minimal state immediate mode graphical user interface toolkit written in ANSI C and licensed under public domain. It was designed as a simple embeddable user interface for application and does not have any dependencies, a default render backend or OS window and input handling but instead provides a very modular library approach by using simple input state for input and draw commands describing primitive shapes as output. So instead of providing a layered library that tries to abstract over a number of platform and render backends it only focuses on the actual UI. Features Immediate mode graphical user interface toolkit Single header library Written in C89 (ANSI C) Small codebase (~18kLOC) Focus on portability, efficiency and simplicity No dependencies (not even the standard library if not wanted) Fully skinnable and customizable Low memory footprint with total memory control if needed or wanted UTF-8 support No global or hidden state Customizable library modules (you can compile and use only what you need) Optional font baker and vertex buffer output Documentation Building This library is self contained in one single header file and can be used either in header only mode or in implementation mode. The header only mode is used by default when included and allows including this header in other headers and does not contain the actual implementation. The implementation mode requires to define the preprocessor macro NK_IMPLEMENTATION in one .c/.cpp file before #includeing this file, e.g.: #define NK_IMPLEMENTATION #include "nuklear.h" IMPORTANT: Every time you include "nuklear.h" you have to define the same optional flags. This is very important not doing it either leads to compiler errors or even worse stack corruptions. Gallery Example /* init gui state */ struct nk_context ctx; nk_init_fixed(&ctx, calloc(1, MAX_MEMORY), MAX_MEMORY, &font); enum {EASY, HARD}; static int op = EASY; static float value = 0.6f; static int i = 20; if (nk_begin(&ctx, "Show", nk_rect(50, 50, 220, 220), NK_WINDOW_BORDER|NK_WINDOW_MOVABLE|NK_WINDOW_CLOSABLE)) { /* fixed widget pixel width */ nk_layout_row_static(&ctx, 30, 80, 1); if (nk_button_label(&ctx, "button")) { /* event handling */ } /* fixed widget window ratio width */ nk_layout_row_dynamic(&ctx, 30, 2); if (nk_option_label(&ctx, "easy", op == EASY)) op = EASY; if (nk_option_label(&ctx, "hard", op == HARD)) op = HARD; /* custom widget pixel width */ nk_layout_row_begin(&ctx, NK_STATIC, 30, 2); { nk_layout_row_push(&ctx, 50); nk_label(&ctx, "Volume:", NK_TEXT_LEFT); nk_layout_row_push(&ctx, 110); nk_slider_float(&ctx, 0, &value, 1.0f, 0.1f); } nk_layout_row_end(&ctx); } nk_end(&ctx); Bindings There are a number of nuklear bindings for different languges created by other authors. I cannot atest for their quality since I am not necessarily proficient in either of these languages. Furthermore there are no guarantee that all bindings will always be kept up to date: Java by Guillaume Legris D by Mateusz Muszyński Golang by golang-ui@github.com Rust by snuk182@github.com Chicken by wasamasa@github.com Nim by zacharycarter@github.com Lua LÖVE-Nuklear by Kevin Harrison MoonNuklear by Stefano Trettel Python pyNuklear by William Emerison Six (ctypes-based wrapper) pynk by nathanrw@github.com (cffi binding) CSharp/.NET by cartman300@github.com Credits Developed by Micha Mettke and every direct or indirect contributor to the GitHub. Embeds stb_texedit, stb_truetype and stb_rectpack by Sean Barrett (public domain) Embeds ProggyClean.ttf font by Tristan Grimmer (MIT license). Big thank you to Omar Cornut (ocornut@github) for his imgui library and giving me the inspiration for this library, Casey Muratori for handmade hero and his original immediate mode graphical user interface idea and Sean Barrett for his amazing single header libraries which restored my faith in libraries and brought me to create some of my own. Finally Apoorva Joshi for his singe-header file packer. License ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This software is available under 2 licenses -- choose whichever you prefer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ALTERNATIVE A - MIT License Copyright (c) 2017 Micha Mettke Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ALTERNATIVE B - Public Domain (www.unlicense.org) This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain. Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use,
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

4 sources
RE: Portability - Not sure how far you'll be able to get by gcc -S'ing something like nuklear[1] (cross-platform ANSI C89) but it might save you some time. I don't have much HLL asm/demoscene experience personally so I'm not sure what's "impressive" as engineering feats these days but this looks cool. As someone who aspires to see a viable Smalltalk-like runtime self-modifiable introspective debugger at the OS level with a decent layer of POSIX compatibility and the ability to run AVX512 instructions, I like the idea that tools like this are out there. Cheers, mate [1] https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear
In Fresh IDE
One problem, you cant optimize at all with electron, you are stuck with shoving a complete web browser solution into your program to make a GUI. You are stuck with a massive amount of dependencies (html/css parser, javascript VM...) to various massive projects for what, easy cross platform support? Sure cross platform GUI's have been a problem, but any developer can agree that dependency to this level within professional code is a great way to cause a massive amount of headache from required library changes, bugs and memory leaks that you have NO control over due to it not being your code, required security updates that require code refactoring for no fault of your own, etc. People keep bringing this up because it is a bad solution to a large problem. Maybe the reason its being rehashed so much is because there is truth to what is being s
Read the rest
aid. I would try finding a graphics library such as opengl, and build a UI in the spirit of something like: https://github.com/ocornut/imgui https://github.com/vurtun/nuklear
In Electron is flash for the desktop (2016)

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