[Yoric]

Having used this approach in a few languages, I agree that it's (sometimes) (much) better for performance, but it tends to wreak havoc on readability.

[snicker7]

Languages and with some sort of decent metaprogramming support can alleviate this sort of issue (see Zig, Julia, Jai, etc.)

[Yoric]

Do you have examples? I cannot think of a good way to do that.

[jmalicki]

For python, you can use pandas. It even has arrow support now.

[Yoric]

Yeah, I need to try it.

But the parent was suggesting that metaprogramming could make readability issues go away and I can't wrap my head around how it would do that.

[rsfern]

In Julia you can use https://juliaarrays.github.io/StructArrays.jl/stable/ which lets your code use the array of structs interface but internally it’s a structure of arrays

[Yoric]

Nice, thanks!