[shrimpx]

> When you call ImGui::Button("Hello World") it has no way of telling if it’s the same button as on the previous frame, or a new one.

Can you solve this by adding stable IDs to the API, so you'd call `ImGui::Button("my-button-id", button_text)`?

[Const-me]

To consistently assign these IDs you gonna have a tree on your side of the API. You’ll then have two visual trees, one on your side on the API, another one on the framework’s side of the API. And then you gonna be debugging things.

Who and when should destroy backend visual nodes? If you won’t use an ID in some frame, does it indicate the backend should drop the related state? What if an animation is still playing on the element in question? What if the missing control re-appears later i.e. was only hidden temporarily? What should backend do if you reuse same ID for different things?

One can implement simple stuff using any approach, immediate GUI is often the simplest of them. It’s when use cases are complicated you need a full-blown retrained mode OO framework. Win32, HTML DOM, MS XAML, QT, UIKit are all implemented that way, that’s not a coincidence.