An introduction to Data Oriented Design with Rust

source : An introduction to Data Oriented Design with Rust - Statistically Insignificant

tags : [[Rust]]

Notes

[[Data-oriented design]] is a programming paradigm whereby the layout of data structures is strongly considered for performance reasons.

In a [[object-oriented]] approach, the code for a player might look like this:

pub struct Player {
    name: String,
    health: f64,
    location: (f64, f64),
    velocity: (f64, f64),
    acceleration: (f64, f64),
}

whereas in DOD, it would look like this:

pub struct DOPlayers {
    names: Vec<String>,
    health: Vec<f64>,
    locations: Vec<(f64, f64)>,
    velocities: Vec<(f64, f64)>,
    acceleration: Vec<(f64, f64)>,
}

This would increase performance dramatically because we’re better using the CPU cache. The article has some good statistics on this.