10 years of Dear ImGui 🎉

On August 11, 2014, I published v1.00 of Dear ImGui on GitHub.
I thought I would take the occasion to reflect about it, share some data points and stories, and generally think about what I want and need.

No big fantastic announcement here, mostly a series of stories and thoughts.
This is a long read. Please be mindful this may be a bit unstructured and going in varying directions. I may improve and rearrange this document over time.

I would first of all like to thank all users, contributors, supporters and commenters who helped and contributed to Dear ImGui and its community.

I will keep trying keep Dear ImGui sane, friendly, efficient, relevant.

🙏 Please be kind to not use this thread to request or discuss features! It would be unmanageable. You can search or open new issues if needed! But feel free to reply with your impressions about this post or about Dear ImGui in general! Thanks!)

INDEX

(from #7892 (comment))

1. Statistics / Some Numbers

2. The Story Of Dear ImGui / Early Timeline
2.1. My Early Programming Experiences & User Interfaces
2.2. Stumbling On The ImGui Paradigm In Japan
2.3. Media Molecule, Writing A New Library
2.4. Publishing (Dear) ImGui
2.5. Focused And Funded Onward!

(from #7892 (comment))

3. What Went Right
3.1. Increased Adoption
3.2. Trust / Consistency / Long-term Maintenance / Nurturing A Culture Of Support
3.3. API Ease Of Use
3.4. Listening, Asking, Eavesdropping
3.5. Runtime Performance
3.6. Lack Of A Build System Is A Feature
3.7. Catching User Mistakes
3.8. ImGui Demo Vs Traditional Documentation
3.9. Backends
3.10. Continuous Integration
3.11. Test Engine And Test Suite
3.12. A Web Of Searchable, Persistent Interlinked Information + Neat Commit History
3.13. Fun Community Events
3.14. Great Third-Party Ecosystem

4. What Went Wrong
4.1. Being A Janitor + A Cop
4.2. Answering Too Fast
4.3. Drowning In The Attention Economy
4.4. Not Accepting More Contributions
4.5. Perception Of Project Stagnating, Where Are The New Cool Stuff?
4.6. General Burnout, Lack Of Focus, ADHD
4.7. Unplanned Career Change
4.8. Maintaining Backends 😭
4.9. Lack Of Visibility Of Some Features
4.10. Discord And Fragmented Communities

(from #7892 (comment))

5. Strategy Of Pacing Growth & Crowd Control

6. Prioritizing Large Tasks Again!!!1
6.1. Better Font Support
6.2. Better Text Functions
6.3. Better Support For Dpi Scaling
6.4. Tackling Some Of The Main Docking Issues
6.5. Rewriting Docking (v3)
6.6. Rewriting Multi-viewports (v2)
6.7. Rewriting InputText (v2)
6.8. Better Better Styling (v2)
6.9. Better Layout Helpers
6.10. Better Support For Idle Mechanisms

(from #7892 (comment))

7. Funding
8. How To Help