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CppCon 2014: Mike Acton "Data-Oriented Design and C++"

CppCon · talk · Watch on YouTube

Software architecture & designSoftware performance & optimizationC, C++, Rust, Go & systems languages

What it is

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 Hacker News recommends it

It is the go-to talk HN points to for data-oriented design and hardware-aware performance thinking, despite Acton's blunt style.

  • 9 people recommended it
  • 9 different months
  • 3 strong recommendations
  • first 2015, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “Thought I'd add a gem from Mike Acton: Data-Oriented Design and C++”

    Gem of a talk on data-oriented design in C++.

    zengid, 2018-04 · Strong recommendation · in “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?”

  2. “This reminds of an amazing talk by Mike Acton on Data oriented design”

    Amazing talk on data-oriented design

    iamcreasy, 2025-07 · Strong recommendation · in “Writing memory efficient C structs”

  3. “one of the most digestible ways to start thinking about performance in high throughput systems”

    Accessible introduction to thinking about performance in high throughput systems

    moregrist, 2026-02 · Strong recommendation · in “Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu”

  4. “For more on this approach, see”

    More on a code style that avoids premature abstractions.

    yoklov, 2015-03 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: How do I become a faster programmer?”

  5. “Mike Acton being aggressively opinionated on the subject, but the lecture is really good”

    Opinionated but really good lecture on writing fast code.

    harry8, 2015-05 · Recommendation · in “Asmttpd – Web server for Linux written in amd64 assembly”

  6. “A great talk which gets you thinking in this mindset is "Data-Oriented Design and C++" by Mike Acton”

    Gets you thinking about cache lines and memory throughput.

    cellularmitosis, 2020-05 · Recommendation · in “Old box, dumb code, few thousand connections, no big deal”

  7. “I am a big fan of Mike Acton's Data Oriented Architecture speeches”

    Data-oriented alternative to OOP from Mike Acton

    DeathArrow, 2022-03 · Recommendation · in “.NET Myths Dispelled”

  8. “Mike Acton presented a great visualization of this in his 2014 DOD talk”

    Acton visualizes the data-oriented design principle in a clip

    dxhdr, 2023-07 · Recommendation · in “Data-Oriented Design Principles”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: data-oriented design, c++, cache performance, game engines, struct of arrays

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