Hacker News Reader

Comment by RubenSandwich | Hacker News Reader

Another vision of Object-Oriented Programming that has gotten quite a bit of traction. (Especially in the game development community.) Is the Entity-Component-System model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93component%E2%80...

If you want to play Entity-Component-System. I'd suggest you check out A-Frame, a WebVR framework that uses and promotes Entity-Component-System: https://aframe.io/

View on HN

I spent quite a lot of time exploring ECS before building my own ECS library for developing 2D games. I have found that with my (minuscule) ECS library it greatly alleviates just about all of the issues I was facing with normal OOP. Everything scales extremely well, the code is almost crystal clear, and it makes code structure very simple. I'm not sure how you could effectively apply ECS outside of simulation style applications but I'm interested to see what influence it has in other domains such as UI.

Well, of course ECS does that. It's ultimately the same approach to data as a normalized relational schema. It's a bit of upfront work but the flexibility of processing and optimization is awesome.

For UI the issue is one of expressing lightweight dependencies, which may be detached and recombined easily. I am currently exploring an approach that combines "imgui" concepts with hierarchical path data, akin to the hard and symbolic links in Unix. Having the path as data allows assemblages of partial routes to be combined to express a "final" data point. The data itself may not entirely exist in a physical tree structure but instead be a combination of procedural data, stored data, and a parser.

The extreme version of an ECS is an EAV: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity–attribute–value_model

When you further qualify by time/transaction you get EAVT like Datomic and then just do queries (potentially recursive), and can implement semantics like "classes" over it.

It's strange that ECSs only have traction in game development. I agree with all the advantages you mentioned, but additionally, they solve the structure-of-arrays/array-of-structures performance discrepancy; this is something Jon Blow is working on with his Jai language.

> I spent quite a lot of time exploring ECS before building my own ECS library for developing 2D games.

Is it publicly available?

It is available on Github:

https://github.com/jackwlee01/Easy-ECS

It is an AS3 library that I use for my Adobe Air games.

This looks a lot like typeclasses to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com