GGWeb

Template for making a GUI app with C++ / Dear ImGui / SDL / OpenGL / Emscripten that can run both natively and in the browser.

Example: https://ggweb.ggerganov.com

Description

This is a startup project for creating C++ GUI applications that can run both as a native app and as a web app. This is achieved by compiling the C++ code to WebAssembly using Emscripten. The project uses Dear ImGui + OpenGL backend to draw stuff on the screen. The project provides basic functionality needed for most apps:

• Create and initialize an SDL window with OpenGL context
• Basic single-threaded Render/Update loop
• Basic HTML boilerplate for running the app in a web page
• Interface for passing data between C++ and Javascript
• Open a URL in new tab
• Copy text to clipboard
• Mechanism for frame throttling when the application is idle to reduce CPU
• etc.

When running natively, the app creates an SDL window and renders stuff using OpenGL. When running as a web app, it runs in a WebGL canvas.

The code is structured in a way that is comfortable for me to use and think about the application state. It is definitely not ideal and does not scale well. Probably with time I will try to improve it and document it better. The main purpose of this repo is to be able to quickly bootstrap a simple cross-platform app with the described stack.

Why?

I like writing C++ GUI apps using Dear ImGui. I often port the applications to the web for demonstration purposes. I find it very useful that with this stack I can run the same C++ application across a large variety of platforms and devices.

Build native

# clone repo and build
git clone https://github.com/ggerganov/ggweb --recursive
cd ggweb && mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j4

# run the app
./bin/ggweb-app

Build web

# init emscripten
source /path/to/emsdk/emsdk_env.sh

# clone repo and build
git clone https://github.com/ggerganov/ggweb --recursive
cd ggweb && mkdir build-em && cd build-em
emcmake cmake ..
make -j4

# update web server
cp ./bin/ggweb-app.*        /path/to/www/html/
cp ./bin/ggweb-app-public/* /path/to/www/html/

Examples

Here are few applications that I have created using this stack. Each of these applications can be started either as a native app or as a web application.

App	Preview
Tweet2Doom State Tree Explorer An interactive explorer of the State Tree of the @tweet2doom bot. Visualizes all nodes that have ever been created by players using the bot on Twitter ➡️ Try Online ➡️ Github Repo
Wordle-bg A wordle clone in Bulgarian ➡️ Try Online ➡️ Github Repo
GGMorse Real-time Morse code audio decoder ➡️ Try Online ➡️ Github Repo	mc-tools.mp4
Spectrogram Real-time audio spectrum visualizer ➡️ Try Online ➡️ Github Repo
Waver Data-over-sound tool - send and receive text messages through sound ➡️ Try Online ➡️ Github Repo
Keytap Proof-of-concept for acoustic keyboard eavesdropping ➡️ Try Online ➡️ Github Repo	Click to watch a Youtube video
Keytap2 Acoustic keyboard eavesdropping based on language n-gram frequencies ➡️ Try Online ➡️ Github Repo	Click to watch a Youtube video
wave-gui Yet another data-over-sound tool ➡️ Try Online ➡️ Github Repo