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Comment by theandrewbailey | Hacker News Reader

Maybe someone can write an OO language where arrays of structs are automatically stored as structs of arrays.

mild /s

Odin has some helpers, was one of the more interesting features I found, but never tried. Not sure if you want to consider Odin OO, but well https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#soa-struct-arrays

Odin is heavily inspired by the lang he or she is referring to!

A sibling comment also mentioned Jai. Not sure what I am missing that the original post was explicitly referring to Jai, some inside joke maybe?

I am sorry, I only know Odin. Jai is this cult on reddit/discord, right? You get access if you socialize enough or something? Not my thing. Not for a language.

(original poster here)

I was just throwing out an idea. I had no idea there were already implementations! Because, to my knowledge, conventional popular languages like C/C++/C#/Java/JS/Python don't do that, and automatically doing that (under certain conditions) feels like an easy performance win.

For what it’s worth, a common example of the capabilities of c++26 reflection is exactly this use case. I can’t remember where I first saw it, but this article [0] showcases the technique pretty well. It’s opt-in so not the compiler optimization that you’re imagining but still neat that it’s possible

[0] https://brevzin.github.io/c++/2025/05/02/soa/

Ah. So, the context (Which I read too far into evidently): 1: One of Jai's initial primary marketing points was to address exactly this: SoA performance with AoS ergonomics. 2: Odin is (or was initially) inspired by Jai.

There's a package to do this in Julia: https://juliaarrays.github.io/StructArrays.jl/stable/

Are you talking about Zig's MultiArrayList?

He is talking about jai the programing language from Jonathan Blow, which is quite cool but there is no way to access it.

something like this https://crates.io/crates/columnar ?

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