[krapp]

My suggestions, none of which are particularly simple but it's C, you get what you get with a language that doesn't even know what strings and arrays are:

0) use Lua with LuaJIT. It has very good C interop and native hashmaps. Downside - Lua has its own rough edges and LuaJIT is frozen at Lua 5.1 with some extensions for 5,2

1) SDL3 has a hashmap implementation with its properties API, and a general purpose hashmap that they're probably going to make public at some point maybe? Downside - overkill if you don't actually want to use the rest of the library.

2) https://github.com/tidwall/hashmap.c this seems to work fine and is the simplest hashmap implementation for C that I've seen. Downside - you still have to write a lot of boilerplate.