Discussion

What Game Engines Know About Data That Databases Forgot

Garlef: Serious question:If you take a BDD/TDD approach - do technologies like this still give you something?I've dabbled a bit into smth similar (SpacetimeDB) with the aim of creating a headless backend for a game.But then I realized that I'd still need to define the interface that I was testing in the traditional software layer and that all the nice DB magic seemed worthless since I'd still have to orchestrate traditionally.(In short: No matter how nice your DB magic is, you will still hide it away in the basement/engine room, right?)

ok_dad: Sounds like we need IDE support for databases like we have for programming runtimes. Need to be able to lint, debug live, etc.

jjordan: I've always passively wondered why this wasn't more of a thing. Something like pgAdmin is fine I guess, but it's always felt like "just barely good enough" rather than an immersive power tool to get things done, and done well. Possibly just a skill issue, but that's been my impression.

dpe82: This seems cool but man it's hard to get over the very, very obvious AI writing.

hedgehog: It's also a bit odd they don't mention column-oriented databases at all.

zffr: Why would column-oriented databases be mentioned? My understanding is that these are typically used for OLAP, but the article seems to talk only about OLTP.

bitwize: When I learned about ECS, I realized that Tablizer (old Slashdot guy who insisted that OOP was a dead end and "table oriented programming" as was done in FoxPro was the way to go) was probably right. Using an ECS for my Android game was a bit more cumbersome, but paid for itself many times over with the ability to create new kinds of entities, implement familiar behaviors for them, and add new ones without code copypasta or inheritance tree entanglement.

SigmundA: >Cache locality by default. In a traditional row store, reading all player positions means loading entire rows — names, inventories, health, everything. Most of those bytes are wasted.Not one mention of column stores? This didn't come from ECS...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_orientation

cmontella: I feel like this is a good place to bring up the "Have You Tried Rubbing a Database on It?" conf, which deals with this sort of topic. If you'd like to read about the intersection between Databases and X, where X is games, robots, user interfaces, developer tools, etc. there are some good talks there, and they're only 10 minutes each so very easy to consume. Also unlike TFA they are not AI generated.https://www.hytradboi.com

trgn: The web is a front-end environment, where users expect 60fps, but where developers violate pretty much all the rules.> Zero-copy is the default, not the optimization:the amount of fluffy mapping, destructuring, temp scope-creation, ... that is the norm now for JS/TS devs is excruciating. how did this become the norm? do it once it doesnt matter, but every single layer in the app doing this and things become jittery. you first take the hit at creation time, and then another time at GC. stop doing that! Pass references around to objects, not recreate them each time at some function boundary.> Entity as pure identity.Stop json.stringifiyng every thing! how many hashThing() implementations i have seen that are essentially Json.stringify. stop it!> Cache locality by default.a little less clear for web dev, much is missing in terms of primitives. but do think about it. if anything, it's good hygiene. fixed typed array does make sense, dont mix&match types in your array, ...Save the web, think like a videogame dev!

Sharlin: Well, it's certainly not going to get better given that most of new Web code is by now probably written by LLMs. Which definitely aren't trained to write performance-oriented JS/TS.

jandrewrogers: Modern database engines tend to use PAX-style storage layouts, which are column structured, regardless of use case. There is a new type of row-oriented analytic storage layout that would be even better for OLTP but it is not widely known yet so I wouldn't expect to see it mentioned.

SigmundA: Because there is a whole section that describes column based storage without mentioning that some databases have column based storage as an option.

goalieca: This is one of the main problems I have with LLMs. It finds patterns in words but not content. I see this in code reviews and eventually outages. Something looks reasonable at the micro scale but clearly didn’t understand something important (because they don’t understand) and it causes a major issue.

boricj: I'm working on an embedded project where I'm actually thinking about using ECS on a STM32H5. It's not about cache-friendly locality (waitstates on internal SRAM for MCUs is basically a rounding error compared to the DRAM latency seen on desktop or server-class hardware), but the business is so complex that the traditional inheritance/composition is getting quite messy. When you end up using virtual and diamond inheritance in C++, you know you're in trouble...It's too bad that ECS isn't more widely known outside of gamedev. It's not just good for performance, it's also legitimately a useful architecture design on its own to solve problems.