[danmaz74]

Data oriented design makes sense in video games where perfomance Is very important, but in most business applications having good abstractions which are flexible and easily maintainable is much more important than optimising for cache usage.

[eska]

I keep hearing this from OOP proponents, but I just don't find it to be true in my experience. Programs written with DOD in mind have very clear data flow and only pass on and use data that is relevant. Programs written with OOP in mind primarily care about some notion of beautiful code and abstractions, which I find to be highly subjective. As a result they generally have very muddy data flow where e.g. unrelated data is passed around that isn't even required to implement a feature. This creates all kinds of poor modularization, dependency hell, huge monoliths, difficult testing (mocking, fakes, etc...), among many other problems. Whenever I have had to rewrite large parts of a program, I have always found it to be easier to do this in a DOD program rather than an OOP program. The biggest reason why DOD is used in video game programming to begin with is flexibility in mixing and matching functionality of game objects (entity-component-systems etc).

[atoav]

I tend to disagree — although I thought the same one or two years ago. Data oriented design doesn’t automatically mean you have to sacrifice useful abstractions on the altar of performance. You’ll have to find different abstractions and ways of composing them together to get a maintainable, flexible result.

In fact I find good data driven designs easier to maintain than good OOP ones..