Data-oriented design
The projects tackled by the software development industry have grown in scale and complexity. Costs are increasing along with the number of developers. Power bills for distributed projects have reached the point where optimisations pay literal dividends. Over the last 10 years, a software development movement has gained traction, a movement founded in games development. The limited resources and complexity of the software and hardware needed to ship modern game titles demanded a different approach. Data-oriented design is inspired by high-performance computing techniques, database design, and functional programming values. It provides a practical methodology that reduces complexity while improving performance of both your development team and your product. Understand the goal, understand the data, understand the hardware, develop the solution. This book presents foundations and principles helping to build a deeper understanding of data-oriented design. It provides instruction on the thought processes involved when considering data as the primary detail of any project.
Stats for nerds
12recommend
18mentions
12people
2019–2026years
89% recommend11% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- - Data-Oriented Design Revisited: Type Safety in the Zig Compiler - Matthew Lugg - https://youtu.be/KOZcJwGdQok?si=YDal2Gwb0IJPFgrI
- Andrew Kelley Practical Data Oriented Design (DoD) - https://youtu.be/IroPQ150F6c?si=F1Z0pLO2W5hbQgpM
- CppCon 2014: Mike Acton "Data-Oriented Design and C++" - https://youtu.be/rX0ItVEVjHc?si=jv4hhTSBh3XH--xQ
- Why You Shouldn’t Forget to Optimize the Data Layout - https://cedardb.com/blog/optimizing_data_layouts/
- Handles are the better pointers - https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html
- Enum of Arrays - https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2024-12-19-enum-of-arrays/
- Data oriented design book - https://www.dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/
- Data-oriented design in practice - Stoyan Nikolov - https://youtu.be/_N5-JjogNXU?si=vhaxYcfE6tl11Sux
- Programming without Pointers - Andrew Kelley - https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/05c72e39-c07e-41bc-ac40-85e83...
- More Speed & Simplicity: Practical Data-Oriented Design in C++ - Vittorio Romeo - CppCon 2025 - https://youtu.be/SzjJfKHygaQ?si=jafavSl2YJWk4vIx
- Rust Handle - https://taintedcoders.com/rust/handles
- I think I had a pretty good understanding of set theory through programming, and although I tried to get into the more mathematical side of it, I found most things to be 1. trivial (because I was used to thinking in lists, sets, hashmaps, etc.), or 2. irrelevant to me. The latter was a shame, because I've always liked the abstraction of math, but I couldn't help but feel I wasn't learning anything actionable when learning more about sets (though maybe I'm wrong).
What had a big impact on me was the relational model, specifically after reading Richard Fabian's Data-oriented Design book [1]. I had watched Mike Acton's famous Data-oriented Design talk [2], then Andrew Kelley's talk [3] where he explains speedups in the Zig compiler using DoD principles (largely using methods from Acton's talk), but Fabian's book tied these concepts to database normalization and the relational model.
Most DoD advice is very "exercise left to the reader", because it's about matching a specific problem, but using the relational model and considering your data's primary and foreign key relations can be really powerful. I just wish more of that power was exposed through regular programming language interfaces, rather than having to pull in and marshal data through a DB. I might have to try C# and Linq.
1. https://www.dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/
- > SoA is not universally better.
This is an important part of Data-oriented Design: the representation of the data should be pragmatically tied to its access patterns, not dogma.
Richard Fabian's DoD book gives the example that (x,y,z) is almost always better as a classic array-of-structs rather than a struct-of-arrays, because if you're accessing one dimension, you probably are want to process the other two dimensions at the same time:
https://www.dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/node9.html#SECTIO...
- Look for data-oriented design [0] (not to be confused with domain-driven design) in addition to ECS.
- see also: Richard Fabian's data-oriented design book -- the chapter on existential processing discusses enums
https://www.dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/node4.html
Rough idea: model everything as relational data - define 1 table for each state. membership of a record in the table corresponding to state X implies that record is in the given state X.
> the reason why you would put an enum in table form, is to reduce control flow impact. Given this, it's when we aren't using the enumerations to control instruction flow that it's fine to leave them alone
An example of the latter might be some kind of state machine, where you can write branch-free code to determine the successor state from current state, and no other processing needs to branch on the state tag.
- In addition to Mike Acton's talk, there is also the "DOD Book": https://www.dataorienteddesign.com/dodbook/
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