“I found this excellent talk to be complementary to my talk[1] on data-oriented GUI in Rust”
Excellent talk on data-oriented GUI in Rust
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I found this excellent talk to be complementary to my talk[1] on data-oriented GUI in Rust, not to plug my own work too much. I found a lot of common ground: * Trying to write object-oriented code in Rust doesn't work well. Writing data-oriented code does. * "Fighting the borrow checker" is a sign you might be doing it wrong. Try data-oriented approaches instead. * Use a structure-of-arrays rather than an array-of-structures. * Use what I call "state splitting" to borrow mutable references to just the state you need; this works well with the structure-of-arrays approach and is a powerful motivator to use it. * To build graph-like structures, reach for a Vec of components, and indexes into the Vec for relationships, as your first choice. Self-references, arena allocators, and Rc are viable alternatives, but you should have a good reason to use them instead of Vec. * Some form of dynamic typing is useful to keep your system loosely coupled (though we ended up with very different forms of dynamic typing, see below). * Data-oriented approaches have taken root in the C++ gaming community, mostly motivated by performance, but adapt well to Rust, and some of the ideas may be useful in domains beyond gaming. There were some other points that went beyond what I talked about, but could fit in well: * A "generational index" is a good way to avoid use-after-free style errors that result from the use of a stale index. The slotmap crate can help. And now for the things that are different.