raygui-jnk guide

24 raygui examples written in jank, a native Clojure dialect that compiles through C++ and LLVM rather than running on the JVM.

raygui was not available to jank before this. It is a header-only C library with no package anywhere, which is why the sibling b12n-raylib-jnk replaced raygui with keyboard controls in seventeen of its examples and wrote up the pattern. This repo builds raygui as an ordinary jank package, so those controls can be real again.

The suite is complete: 24 examples across 7 groups. bb examples prints the live count.

These pages are published at https://raygui-jnk.b12n.app and mirrored into b12n-wikis. Both come from docs/guide/ in the project repo, so edit the Markdown there.

Why raygui suits this

Nearly every raygui control has the same shape. Bounds in, application state through a pointer, an int out:

int GuiSlider(Rectangle bounds, const char *textLeft, const char *textRight,
              float *value, float minValue, float maxValue);

There is no callback machinery, no retained widget tree, and raygui keeps no per-control state at all. jank has one genuine gap in its C interop, which is that you cannot hand a jank function to a C API expecting a function pointer. raygui never asks for one, so that gap does not touch this repo.

Where the work actually went

Not into declaring functions. jank compiles through C++, so raygui.h is the binding and the count of hand-written signatures here is zero. The sibling raygui-jlt writes 61 defcfn forms to reach the same place through an FFI.

The work went into one rule instead: a native value cannot cross a jank function boundary. A Rectangle cannot be passed to or returned from a defn, so the wrapper is built so every native value is born and consumed inside the same function body, and only numbers, bools, strings and opaque boxes travel between namespaces. the-jank-shape.md is the full account.

The commands that matter

bb info                  # every task, grouped. Start here.
bb examples              # just the suite, grouped
bb check                 # compile every example headless, no window
bb lint                  # clj-kondo over every .jank file
bb basic-controls        # run one, windowed. Q quits.
bb run-all               # cycle all 24 as a demo reel
bb shot basic-controls   # run headless and screenshot

There is no separate build step for raygui. raygui-sys/jank-build.bb compiles it as part of the first lein invocation, against the same libraylib the raylib-sys package provides.

The pages

the-jank-shape.md: the boundary rule and everything that follows from it. Cells, text buffers, the two argument shapes that look identical in C, the array marshalling, and the one place where a rule the sibling repo states turns out to be narrower than it reads.
building-raygui.md: the jank package protocol, why linking against the right libraylib is load-bearing rather than incidental, how to use raygui-sys from another project, and a build cache that will hand you a stale library without saying so.
what-the-gates-do-not-catch.md: ten ways an example here can be wrong while every automated check passes. Each one happened during this port. Read it before adding an example.
example-catalog.md: all 24 with screenshots, plus the six vendored themes. Generated from the registry by bb scripts/gen_catalog.clj, as the README gallery is by bb readme:examples.

The screenshot is a gate

For a GUI library that is not a nicety. A control at the wrong bounds, a style that silently failed to load, a colour with red and blue swapped, or a frame captured before the render batch flushed all compile cleanly and pass bb check. Every example in this repo has had its PNG looked at by a person.

What no gate here covers is interaction. Synthetic clicks do not actuate a raylib or GLFW app at all, which b12n-raylib-jlt measured at 0 of 8 clicks delivered across every hold duration it tried. So the automated claim is that the suite renders correctly. Whether a dropdown opens or a slider drags has been checked by hand.

Demo GIFs are a stated non-goal

Same measurement, taken to its conclusion. raygui is mouse-driven by definition, so a recorded GIF could show hover and pointer motion but never a button press, a dropdown opening, or a slider being dragged. Twenty-four recordings of controls nobody touches would be worse than none, so the suite ships static screenshots instead.

Vendored revision

raygui-sys/vendor/raygui.h is pinned at 5.0-9-gfbf5d95, zlib licensed. That is nine commits past the 5.0 release and its API differs from the published 5.0 documentation in a few places, so write bindings from the header in vendor/. NOTICE carries the full attribution, including the four examples ported from raygui's own example tree.