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Posting to Learn in reply to Nick Sabalausky

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On Wednesday, 5 March 2014 at 01:16:37 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On 3/4/2014 7:42 PM, bearophile wrote:
>> Nick Sabalausky:
>>
>>> - Lumping all data/functionality for a single "object" 
>>> instance into
>>> the same physical chunk of memory causes problems for 
>>> parallelization.
>>> And that's increasingly problematic on modern processors 
>>> which work
>>> best when operating as "streaming-data processors". (See
>>> "Entity/Component Systems"[1] - There are good reasons 
>>> videogame
>>> development has mostly switched from OOP to entity/component 
>>> systems.)
>>
>> Sometimes OOP is handy, for GUIs and other situations, but if 
>> today a
>> more horizontal placement of fields is more efficient when high
>> performance is needed, then perhaps a creative programmer has 
>> to find
>> the courage to step out of his/her/hir language constraints to 
>> invent a
>> better language. Is it possible to invent a language more fit 
>> for this
>> different kind of data layout?
>>
>
> I don't think it's necessary to go as far as creating a new 
> language. An entity-system in a low-level-capable language 
> gives you enough power to control layouts however appropriate, 
> and using them is pretty easy.
>
> It seems intimidating at first, but it's really just like a 
> relational DB: You have a unique ident for each "object" (ie, 
> what an OO system would call an instantiated object, but in 
> this case called an "entity"). And then all the data associated 
> with the "object/entity" is stored in various 
> tables/structs/whatever (in this case, called "components") 
> with the entity's unique identifier being the primary key for 
> each table/component. Functionality operates on a particular 
> table/component, or a set of specific tables/components, either 
> on a row-at-a-time basis or as the whole table as an aggregate.
>
> Note that this imposes very little, if any, requirements on 
> in-memory layouts, so things can be laid out however desired - 
> possibly even with per-platform topologies thanks to the magic 
> of metaprogramming. In any case, metaprogramming can help 
> abstract away many of the internal memory-layout details.
>
> Playing around with the Unity3D editor, and it's tutorial 
> videos, can help grok the usage and modeling power of entities 
> (like any good modern game engine, it uses an entity-based 
> design). Although, FWIW, I'm not convinced Unity3D's design is 
> able to *fully* take advantage of all the potential performance 
> benefits of an entity system (mostly because of its CLR-based 
> scripting and black-box closed-source engine).
>
> But, I admit, I have wondered if a language could aid the 
> creation/usage of entity systems with some special language 
> features.

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