Data Oriented Design Resources

A curated list of awesome data oriented design resources.

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• Data Oriented Design
  • Presentations
  • Blog Posts
  • Videos
  • Other
  • Code Examples

Presentations

• A Step Towards Data Orientation (2010) - Johan Torp
• Introduction To Data Oriented Design (2010) - DICE
• Memory Optimization (2003) - Christer Ericson
• A Crash Course in Modern Hardware - Dr. Cliff Click
• Practical Examples In Data Oriented Design (2013) - Niklas Frykholm
• Three Big Lies (2008) - Mike Acton
• Typical C++ Bullshit (2008) - Mike Acton
• Data-Oriented Design and C++ (2014) - Mike Acton
• Entity Component Systems & Data Oriented Design (2018) - Aras Pranckevičius
• Pitfalls of Object Oriented Programming - Revisited (2017) - Tony Albrecht
• Pitfalls of Object Oriented Programming (2009) - Tony Albrecht

Blog Posts

• Adventures in data-oriented design – Part 1: Mesh data (2011) - Stefan Reinalter
• Adventures in data-oriented design – Part 2: Hierarchical data (2013) - Stefan Reinalter
• Adventures in data-oriented design – Part 3a: Ownership (2013) - Stefan Reinalter
• Adventures in data-oriented design – Part 3b: Internal References (2013) - Stefan Reinalter
• Adventures in data-oriented design – Part 3c: External References (2013) - Stefan Reinalter
• Adventures in data-oriented design – Part 4: Skinning it to 11 (2013) - Stefan Reinalter
• An introduction to Data Oriented Design with Rust
• Allocation Adventures 1: The DataComponent (2015) - Niklas Frykholm
• Allocation Adventures 2: Arrays of Arrays (2015) - Niklas Frykholm
• An Example in Data-Oriented Design: Sound Parameters (2011) - Niklas Frykholm
• Building a Data-Oriented Entity System (part 1) (2014) - Niklas Frykholm
• Building a Data-Oriented Entity System (Part 2: Components) (2014) - Niklas Frykholm
• Building a Data-Oriented Entity System (Part 3: The Transform Component) (2014) - Niklas Frykholm
• Building a Data-Oriented Entity System (Part 4: Entity Resources) (2014) - Niklas Frykholm
• Data Locality (2014) - http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com
• Data Oriented Luddites (2010) - Tom Forsyth
• Data-Oriented Design (Or Why You Might Be Shooting Yourself in The Foot With OOP) (2009) - Noel Llopis
• Data-Oriented Design Now And In The Future (2011) - Noel Llopis
• Data-Oriented Hash Table (2015) - Nathan Reed
• Is Data-Oriented Design a Paradigm? (2010) - Steve Anichini
• Maximizing code performance by thinking data first - Part 1 (2016) - Nicolas Lopez
• Maximizing code performance by thinking data first - Part 2 (2016) - Nicolas Lopez
• Musings on Data-Oriented Design (2010) - Steve Anichini
• Niklas Frykholm github blog (2009-2016)
• OOP != classes, but may == DOD (2010) - roathe.com
• The Latency Elephant (2009) - Tony Albrecht
• Visual Scripting the Data-Oriented Way (2010) - Niklas Frykholm
• What is Data-Oriented Game Engine Design? (2014) - David Davidović
• Comments on Data Oriented Design – Part I (2015) - Michael Gautier
• Comments on Data Oriented Design – Part II (2015) - Michael Gautier
• Data oriented design is not about SoA and ECS (2020) - Alex Dixon

Videos

• CPU Caches and Why You care (2014) - Scott Meyers
• Data-Oriented Demo: SOA, composition (2015) - Jonathan Blow
• Data-Oriented Design and C++ (cppcon 2014) - Mike Acton
• Data-Oriented Design (2013) - Sean Middleditch
• Democratizing Data-Oriented Design: A Data-Oriented Approach to Using Component Systems (2018) - Mike Acton
• Democratizing Data-Oriented Design: From C# to Machine Code (2018) - Andreas Fredriksson
• Efficiency with Algorithms, Performance with Data Structures (2014, cppcon) - Chandler Carruth
• Memory Optimization (2003) - Christer Ericson
• Native Code Performance and Memory: The Elephant in the CPU (2013) - Eric Brumer
• Object-Oriented Programming is Bad (2016) - Brian Will
• Performance Optimization, SIMD and Cache (2015) - Sergiy Migdalskiy
• OOP Is Dead, Long Live Data-oriented Design (cppcon 2018) - Stoyan Nikolov
• Using Rust For Game Development (RustConf 2018) - Catherine West
• Overwatch Gameplay Architecture and Netcode (GDC 2017) - Timothy Ford
• Rust Auckland - Azriel: ECS: A Programming Paradigm (2018) - Azriel Hoh
• Unity at GDC - ECS for Small Things (2018) - Vlad Vukicevic
• Building a Data-Oriented Future - Mike Acton (2019) - Mike Acton
• Intrinsic Functions - Vector Processing Extensions - Javidx9
• GDC 2015: How to Write Code the Compiler Can Actually Optimize - Mike Acton
• A Practical Guide To Applying Data-Oriented Design - Andrew Kelley
• A Practical Guide To Applying Data-Oriented Design - Q&A - Andrew Kelley
• Embedded Systems: Marketable Skills & Intro To Data-Oriented Design Western Michigan University IEEE - James Novorita
• Pitfalls of Object Oriented Programming, Revisited (TGC 2017) - Tony Albrecht
• Path Tracing Three Ways: A Study of C++ Style (CppCon 2019) - Matt Godbolt
• More Speed & Simplicity: Practical Data-Oriented Design in C++ - CppCon 2025 - Vittorio Romeo
• Practical Reflection With C++26 - CppCon 2025 - Barry Revkin

Other

• Data alignment: Straighten up and fly right (2005) - Jonathan Rentzsch
• Data Locality (2014) - Robert Nystrom
• Data Oriented Design (2011-2014) - plus.google.com
• Mike Acton's review of OgreNode.cpp, revealing some common OOP game engine development pitfalls (2013)
• On why DoD isn't a modelling approach at all (2016) - Christer Ericson
• What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory (2007) - Ulrich Drepper
• What Is Data Oriented Design (2009) - stackoverflow.com
• Data Oriented Design Book (2018) - Richard Fabian
• Cache-Line Aware Data Structures (2018) - accu.org
• Investigating Data-Oriented Design - Master Thesis (2019) - Per-Morten Straume
• The Data-Oriented Design Process for Game Development - Jessica D. Bayliss

Code Examples

• bgfx
• crown
• dear imgui