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Initialization and the Main Loop

Overview

In order to use libui, you must first initialize it. All initialization is done through the uiInit() function. This is usually one of the first things you do in your program.

The thread you call uiInit() on becomes the "GUI thread". This is the thread that all your UI is done on from the perspective of the operating system, so it is absolutely essential that you do not call any other function of libui from any other thread that you create (except for uiQueueMain(), which is discussed later).

Furthermore, on some systems, this thread must also be the thread that main() is called on; macOS is the notable example here. Therefore, to be safe, you should only call uiInit() from main(), or from a function that runs on the same thread as main(). If you are using a language binding, that binding may provide further instruction on how to do so in that language.

uiInit() can fail, in which case it will provide information about that failure in a special variable of type uiInitError that you provide it. The most useful member of this struct is Message, which contains a human-readable error message you can use to diagnose problems initializing libui. If you are using a language binding, the language binding may abstract this away and provide the error to you in a langauge-specific form.

Here is an example of correct use of uiInit() in C:

uiInitError err;

memset(&err, 0, sizeof (uiInitError));
err.Size = sizeof (uiInitError);
if (!uiInit(NULL, &err)) {
	fprintf(stderr, "error initializing libui: %s\n", err.Message);
	return 1;
}

Note that if uiInit() fails, you cannot use libui's message box functions to report the error.

Reference

`uiInit()`

int uiInit(void *options, uiInitError *err);

uiInit() initializes libui. It returns nonzero on success and zero on failure; in the event of a failure, err is filled with relevant information explaining the failure.

err is required and must be properly initialized. If err is NULL or err->Size does not match sizeof (uiError), uiInit() immediately returns zero without doing anything. If any of the other fields of err are not zero-initialized as with memset(0), the behavior is undefined.

options must be NULL; no options are currently defined. If options is not NULL, uiInit() will return an error without initializing anything.

As part of initialization, the thread that uiInit() is called on becomes the GUI thread. All of the functions of libui except uiQueueMain() must be called from this thread. On platforms where which thread you run GUI code on is restricted, uiMain() will return an error if it is called from the wrong thread; to avoid this, you should always call uiInit() from the thread that main() itself is called from.

If uiInit() fails, no other libui function is safe to call. This means that you cannot use any of libui's message box functions to report the error.

Notes for language binding authors: Your language will likely provide its own preferred mechanism for reporting errors. You should wrap uiInit() to return errors this way, creating and managing the memory for uiInitError yourself and transforming the returned error according to both the format of uiInitError described below and the rules for encoding errors in your language of choice.

`uiUninit()`

void uiUninit(void);

`uiInitError`

typedef struct uiInitError uiInitError;
struct uiInitError {
	size_t Size;
	char Message[256];
};

uiInitError describes an error returned by uiInit().

You are responsible for allocating and initializing this struct. To do so, you simply zero the memory for this struct and set its Size field to sizeof (uiInitError). The example in the main section of this page demonstrates how to do this.

In the event of an error, Message will contain a NUL-terminated C string in the encoding expected by fprintf(). This is in contrast to the rest of libui, which uses UTF-8 strings.

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