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

CppCon · 862.8K views · 2014-09-30 · 1:27:46

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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

Recommended by 9 HN people across 9 months · HN mentions 2015–2026

Topics

Software architecture & designSoftware performance & optimizationC, C++, Rust, Go & systems languages
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data-oriented designc++cache performancegame enginesstruct of arrays

What people said

moregrist · 2026-02 · Strong recommendation

It 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 job of making it more broadly known. His CppCon talk from 2014 [0] is IMO one of the most digestible ways to start thinking about performance in high throughput systems. In terms of heroes, I’d place Mike Acton, Fabian Giesen [1], and Bruce Dawson [2] at the top of the list. All solid performance-oriented people who’ve taken real time to explain how they think and how you can think that way as well. I miss being able to listen in on gamedev Twitter circa 2013 before all hell broke loose. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]

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iamcreasy · 2025-07 · Strong recommendation

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]

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zengid · 2018-04 · Strong recommendation

A lot of great talks already mentioned. Thought I'd add a gem from Mike Acton: Data-Oriented Design and C++ [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by CppCon, played through YouTube.

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