CppCon 2018: Stoyan Nikolov “OOP Is Dead, Long Live Data-oriented Design”

That's a very good point. It might be question of high versus low level. From a video I watched today (the rest of the video is worth watching, too, but the following stand-alone quote is apropos): "Polymorphism and interfaces have to be kept under control. I don't believe that their role is in a very low level system like interpolating a couple of numbers in the animations, but they have their place in high level systems, in client facing APIs. They are amazing if you do a type of plug in and you really need some type of dynamic polymorphism." [VIDEO]

Just adding a more recent video on it from CppCon 2018 where the presenter goes over a specific worked example. [VIDEO]

Glad to see some agreement there. I'm interested in building an ECS-based approach for a UI system at some point. The Yoga layout engine (implements flexbox -- [LINK] ) seems to actually be pretty amenable to just incorporating as a `Layout` or `Flex` component, then you could have components for platform-specific renderings (eg. `iOSTextInput`, `AndroidTextInput`, `DOMTextInput` in wasm, ...) that could read from cross-platform common components (`TextInput`). A core aspect would also be a `Hierarchy` component that just has a parent entity id and a list of child entity ids (that it keeps in sync properly). Then bind things to JS and allow you to code it from React, while still being able to eg. run an animation thread for some specific animations that just queries and reads/writes the `Layout` and `AnimationSpec`s etc. Interesting talk re: data oriented design for a webby animation engine here actually: [VIDEO]

In the article they mention that most programs are not dominated by arrays but objects. An other cure for that is to use arrays of primitives a lot more: [VIDEO]

People are starting to use data oriented design instead of OOP. Data oriented design doesn't hide state, is generally faster and easier to comprehend as it doesn't abstract too much. [LINK] [VIDEO] [LINK]

There's plenty of good talks and literature on the subject and why it is applicable to game development, but also more generally. This talk by Mike Acton (Formerly Insomniac now Unity): [LINK] I recommend this talk all the time, since it is the one that got me convinced to look into DoD seriously. Also: More Mike Acton (now at Unity): [LINK] Stoyan Nikolov “OOP Is Dead, Long Live Data-oriented Design”: [VIDEO] Overwatch Gameplay Architecture and Netcode (More specifically about ECS): [LINK] The main argument is that you work with data so you should care about data. All a program does is take some input, do something with it, and give you an output. If you structure your program around this mindset, a lot of problems become much simpler. Concurrency is one thing that becomes much simpler to reason about now that you understand how your data is managed and moved around. Realisations that most of the time you have multiple of something and very rarely do you have a single thing. So having a lot of small objects of the same type each doing some work within their deep call-stack, rather than running through an array of them and doing the work you need to do. I disagree that encapsulation is a brilliant idea _in general_, because it promotes hiding data, and hiding data is not inherently good. There's obviously cases, where there is internally critical, but since all your state is simply tables of data, your program is just choosing to represent that data in some way, which can mak

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Static typings + type inference Parse, don't validate [LINK] All libs/products should be pure functions, with input output documented, making libs/products predictable Use in-app event sourcing to reduce the need for global states states DoD [VIDEO] In non bare-metal languages, this will be useful for readability For errors, return instead of throw