It's also notable that video games are programs that run for hours and iterate over large sets of very similar entities at 60 frames or more per second repeatedly and often do very similar operations on each of the entities.

That also means that "just do an array of flat records" is a very sane default even if it seems brutish at first.

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quietbritishjim 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

I think when he said "just do an array of flat records" he meant as opposed to record of arrays (i.e. row oriented vs column oriented), as opposed to fancy data structures which I think you're assuming he was implying. Separate arrays for each data member are common in game engines exactly because they're good for iterating over, which as you said is common.

	▲	O3marchnative 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's also great for letting the compiler unlock auto-vectorization opportunities without delving into the world of manual SIMD. Even storing something simple such as array of complex numbers as an structure of arrays (SoA) rather than an array of structures (AoS) can unlock a lot of optimizations. For example, less permutes/shuffles and more arithmetic instructions. Depending on how many fields you actually need when you iterate over the data, you prevent cache pollution as well.