If you’ve ever worked with an immediate-mode GUI system (e.g. Dear ImGui), you’ve most certainly seen something like this:

1if imgui.Button("Do Action") {
2    // action
3}

The GUI library uses the "Do Action" string is both as the visible text for showing the button, but also, it generates a unique integer ID by hashing it. This ID is then pushed to a stack of IDs, from which it also calculates an ID for the current scope by XORing it with the previous scope ID.

What about alternatives?

Using name strings in a GUI system for IDs is really nice, but are there other ways? I like to use the immediate-mode paradigm for more than just GUI, and in many cases using string doesn’t seem ideal.

For example, consider an immediate-mode collider system. Each frame, every entity can call collider