[munificent]

> the Rust game dev community is overly fixated on ECS.

Not just Rust. The game dev community everywhere is infatuated with ECS.

It's basically cargo culting. There is a large base of amateur or indie game developers who want to feel like they are doing game development the "right" way. One big aspect of that is performance. ECS has a reputation for efficiency (which is true, when used well in a context where your performance problems are related to caching), so you see a lot of game devs slavishly applying it to their code in hopes that the "go as fast as a AAA game" Gods will land on their runway and deliver the goods.

Every time I see a new ECS framework in JavaScript, I die a little on the inside.

[TillE]

The problem is that software design in general is an incredibly messy field that's still basically in its infancy. Developers want simple solutions to complex design problems, or at least they want some decent architectural guidelines so they can avoid constantly reinventing the wheel, badly. Remember when MVC was all the rage?

ECS is good though, it's a perfectly solid answer to a lot of thorny design questions. Where problems frequently arise is when you try to jam absolutely everything in your game into the ECS structure. In practice you're probably going to have a lot of data which lives outside the system and is not attached to any entity.

[lukebitts]

Most of what I see about ECS is how much easier it is to have dynamic behaviors without inheritance, and it is, so I don’t see why it would be bad for newcomers to use it or to have an ecs lib written in js.

[munificent]

> how much easier it is to have dynamic behaviors without inheritance

I think you're getting at the idea that instead of having objects differ in their behavior by overriding methods, you have them differ by having fields bound to objects that implement different behavior.

Assuming I understand you right, that's an excellent insight, but it's just the classic principle:

Favor object composition over class inheritance.

There's nothing new in that idea or anything special to ECS. Do you know how I know? Because that sentence here is directly quoted from page 20 of "Design Patterns", which ECS and DoD are often claimed to be in direct opposition to. :)

[lukebitts]

> I think you're getting at the idea that instead of having objects differ in their behavior by overriding methods, you have them differ by having fields bound to objects that implement different behavior.

I guess I'm more getting at the idea of changing the game design at any point by adding or removing components, a way to make it easier for devs to cope with changing requirements (and they are always changing ofc), but you are right about favoring composition over inheritance, that by itself is pretty good.

I can't really talk about "things that are often claimed" and from the way you talk about this it seems like you have come across different opinions from mine on what ECS is or its value. Sad to see such a useful pattern get "corrupted", but I suppose that is inevitable.

[pjmlp]

Just like VBX, COM, SOM and Obj-C Protocols/Categories based architectures, now that is something incredibly new.

[pjmlp]

Not only that, it is incredible how it gets trumped as a new idea, when stuff like COM, Objective-C protocols and plenty of other component based architectures were already a subject in OOP related papers during the late 90's.

But that is how cargo cult usually goes.

[ummonk]

It's a totally different composition pattern though. It uses more trait-style multiple inheritance, unlike the typical "has-a" composition typically used in object-oriented languages. Additionally, it intentionally breaks encapsulation, which is a key tenet of object-oriented design.

[barrkel]

I wouldn't dismiss the JS ECS frameworks without measurement.

Polymorphism has costs, and while dynamic languages work hard to remove them, they still work best when they're able to monomorphize the call site, because that enables inlining without combinatoric explosion from chained polymorphic calls.

Having a single type in your array means field accesses, method calls etc. have the potential to be monomorphized. There are performance wins to laying out your data in ways that avoid the need for polymorphism.

[munificent]

> I wouldn't dismiss the JS ECS frameworks without measurement.

I think the burden of proof is on the part of JS ECS frameworks to show they do have better performance by virtue of DoD and, if so, why. JS engine programmers have been optimizing object-oriented code for literally forty years, all the way back to when they were making Smalltalk VMs.

If somehow a couple of folks hacking on ECS frameworks have managed to write code that runs faster on those JS engines than the kind of code they were designed for, I'd like to see it.

> Having a single type in your array means field accesses, method calls etc. have the potential to be monomorphized.

Sure, but object-oriented code does not require any more polymorphism than DoD does. Consider:

* Iterate over an array of monomorphic components and call a method on each one.

* Iterate over an array of monomorphic entities, access a monomorphic property, and call a method on the latter.

There's an extra property access in the latter (which can easily be inlined), but no polymorphic dispatch. In practice, yes, it is possible to reorganize your JavaScript code in ways that play nicer with inline and possibly even code caching. But I have never seen any evidence that JS ECS frameworks actually do that. Instead, the few I've poked around in seem like typical slow imperative dynamically-typed JS.

If someone is going to take a pattern that was invented specifically for a language like C++ that gives you precise control over memory layout and then apply it to a language that not doesn't give you that control but often uses hash tables to store an object's state, I think the burden of proof is on the framework to show that the pattern actually applies.

[gavinray]

Okay, here you go

https://github.com/thi-ng/umbrella/tree/master/packages/ecs

Optimized Typescript ECS with a demo rendering 100,000 live 3D particles

[munificent]

That one's pretty interesting. Here you can see they are putting real effort into thinking about the performance of the underlying VM. Using typed arrays is neat.

[gavinray]

The author, Karsten Schmidt is one of the most talented devs I've ever seen.

Super nice guy too, always willing to share information or explain stuff to you if he's around.

[barrkel]

Modern JS engines won't use a hash table for the object state, they'll use a hidden class, and member accesses will be fixed offset indirect loads guarded by a type check. Initialize your objects carefully in a deterministic order, and I'd expect you can control field order and adjacency.

I'd expect the wins from reworking your JS so that your target JS engine lays out data out better would often be larger than the wins in C++, simply because the worst case is so bad.

I'd add a third option to your pair: iterating over several arrays of properties - especially numeric properties - rather than an array of objects which each have numeric properties. That can get you substantial wins in Java, never mind JS.

[munificent]

> Modern JS engines won't use a hash table for the object state, they'll use a hidden class, and member accesses will be fixed offset indirect loads guarded by a type check.

The type checks themselves have significant overhead, and it's easier to fall off the shadow class fast path than you might expect.

> Initialize your objects carefully in a deterministic order, and I'd expect you can control field order and adjacency.

True, but that's equally true of non-ECS architectures. I have yet to see much evidence that the ECS JS engines I've looked at are actually taking that into account.

[meheleventyone]

I don’t believe any JS engines do any “shape” or “hidden class” caching other than for call site polymorphism?

[KMag]

> ... so you see a lot of game devs slavishly applying it to their code in hopes that the "go as fast as a AAA game" Gods will land on their runway and deliver the goods.

I watched this sentence unfold with bated breath, waiting to yell "and ze sticks the landing!", only to see it end with "goods" instead of "cargo". It's frustratingly close to perfect, though perhaps to end the paragraph with "cargo", you'd have to begin with some synonym for cargo culting.

[munificent]

I used "goods" as a synonym for "delivered packages". I think it works OK. Maybe "shipment" would have been a better choice.