OOP is dead, long live OOP

Seeing this has been linked outside of game-development circles: "ECS" (this wikipedia page is garbage, btw -- it conflates EC-frameworks and ECS-frameworks, which aren't the same...) is a faux-pattern circulated within game-dev communities, which is basically a version of the relational model, where "entities" are just ID's that represent a formless object, "components" are rows in specific tables that reference an ID, and "systems" are procedural code that can modify the components. This "pattern" is always posed as a solution to an over-use of inheritance, without mentioning that an over-use of inheritance is actually bad under OOP guidelines. Hence the rant. This isn't the "one true way" to write software. It's getting people to actually look at existing design guidelines.

This blog post is inspired by Aras Pranckevičius' recent publication of a talk aimed at junior programmers, designed to get them to come to terms with new "ECS" architectures. Aras follows the typical pattern (explained below), where he shows some terrible OOP code and then shows that the relational model is a great alternative solution (but calls it "ECS" instead of relational). This is not a swipe at Aras at all - I'm a fan of his work and commend him on the great presentation! The reason I'm picking on his presentation in particular instead of the hundred other ECS posts that have been made on the interwebs, is because he's gone through the effort of actually publishing a git repository to go along with his presentation, which contains a simple little "game" as a playground for demonstrating different architecture choices. This tiny project makes it easy for me to actually, concretely demonstrate my points, so, thanks Aras!

Leave a Comment