wtf is atlas?

Atlas is a graphical user interface library for C++ programs on Windows, giving developers ready made building blocks like buttons, sliders, text boxes, tables, tabs, menus, and charts to construct an application's interface instead of drawing everything from scratch. It supports four different graphics backends, DirectX 11, DirectX 12, OpenGL, and Vulkan, and uses one shared shader system so the same visual effects work identically no matter which backend a project uses. The library covers a wide range of common interface pieces: checkboxes, toggles, radio buttons, sliders, single and multi line text fields with selection, clipboard support, and undo, dropdown menus, tree views, resizable tables, tooltips, popups, and several chart types including pie charts, histograms, and line plots, plus a color picker. It also supports docking, meaning windows can be dragged into floating panels, grouped into tabbed sets, or split and resized, with the resulting layout able to be saved. A callback lets a developer render their own custom 3D content, such as a game scene or a mesh, directly inside a panel alongside the standard widgets. Atlas is self contained, meaning it does not depend on any third party libraries, and was written from scratch by one developer as a personal summer project using Microsoft's C++ compiler. It comes with dark and light visual presets, adjustable styling, and built in smooth animations for a polished look out of the box. To use it, a developer's own application is responsible for creating the window, graphics device, and rendering loop, while Atlas handles building and drawing the interface itself each frame through a small set of function calls. A full sample project demonstrating all four backends is included, along with a prebuilt package containing headers and a static library that can be linked directly into another project. Atlas requires Windows 10 or 11, Visual Studio, and C++17, with Vulkan support needing the separate Vulkan SDK. It is free, open source, and licensed under MIT.