THE VIDEO SHELF · data-oriented design
CppCon 2014: Mike Acton "Data-Oriented Design and C++"
Mike Acton of Insomniac Games argues that a program's purpose is transforming data, and shows how common C++ approaches work against that in performance-critical game development. He covers cache behavior, data layout and the limits of compilers.
Why HN readers recommended it
It is the go-to talk HN points to for data-oriented design and hardware-aware performance thinking, despite Acton's blunt style.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- CppCon
- Topic
- data-oriented design
- Format
- talk
- Level
- intermediate
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 9
- HN mentions in dataset
- 20
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2015–2026
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
A lot of great talks already mentioned. Thought I'd add a gem from Mike Acton: Data-Oriented Design and C++ [VIDEO]
zengid on Hacker News · 2018-04
In Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?This reminds of an amazing talk by Mike Acton on Data oriented design: [VIDEO] And there is a related talk by Andrew Kelley implementing these ideas on Zig toolchain: [LINK]
iamcreasy on Hacker News · 2025-07
In Writing memory efficient C structsIt clearly didn’t come out of game dev. Many people doing high performance work on either embedded or “big silicon” (amd64) in that era were fully aware of the importance of locality, branch prediction, etc But game dev, in particular Mike Acton, did an amazing …
moregrist on Hacker News · 2026-02
In Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.
