[Blog post] Why and when you should use SoA

[ZombineDev via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Saturday, 26 March 2016 at 20:55:17 UTC, maik klein wrote:
> [snip]
>
> Thanks, yes that is simpler.
>
> But I am not sure that I want to have pluggable containers in 
> SOA, mostly because every field would have overhead from the 
> container.
>
> For example array has size, length etc as overhead, but it is 
> also not that much and probably won't matter anyway.
>
> But I also thought about it, maybe sometimes I want to use a 
> map instead of an array for some fields. So I need to have a 
> way of telling which field should get which container.
>
> Maybe something like this:
>
> SOA!(Foo, Array, HashMap, DList);
>
> The current implementation is mostly for experimentation.

Never mind. Anything with memory representation different from an 
array would ruin cache locality. My thinking was that using a 
container defined somewhere else would simplify the code.

I tried a couple approaches and came up with the following, which 
I think this is the most efficient in terms of space overhead and 
number of allocations (but still generic), implementation that is 
possible:
http://dpaste.dzfl.pl/3de1e18756f8

It took me a couple of tries, but overall I'm satisfied my code, 
although is it's more low-level and more meta-heavy than yours.