Comment by lavabiopsy

IMO, Dear ImGui is great for its original purpose (debugging GUIs, simple demos), but once you start adding complexity, custom layouts and custom widgets on top of it the state tracking gets to be just as bad as retained mode if not worse. Unless there was some best practice that I missed, one has to take great pains to avoid re-running the layout multiple times per frame, whereas a retained mode GUI would be able to handle that easily.