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Andrew Kelley: A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design (DoD)

ChimiChanga · talk · Watch on YouTube

Software performance & optimizationSoftware architecture & designC, C++, Rust, Go & systems languages

What it is

Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, presents practical data-oriented design techniques for shrinking memory footprint and making programs cache friendly. He ends with a case study of how these ideas sped up the Zig compiler.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN cites it as one of the best talks on data-oriented design, applying struct-of-arrays and compact data layouts to a real compiler.

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 5 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2024, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “Another great talk about making efficient lexers and parsers is Andrew Kelley's "Practical Data Oriented Design”

    Strategies to reduce memory footprint and make programs cache friendly.

    emmanueloga_, 2024-11 · Recommendation · in “Rust for tokenising and parsing”

  2. “there is a related talk by Andrew Kelley implementing these ideas on Zig toolchain”

    Applies data-oriented design ideas to the Zig toolchain.

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

  3. “DoD in the Zig compiler”

    Data-oriented design applied in the Zig compiler.

    Rendello, 2025-10 · Recommendation · in “Your data model is your destiny”

  4. “here's few videos of interest”

    Video of interest on struct-of-arrays layouts.

    gethly, 2026-01 · Recommendation · in “Why Object of Arrays beat interleaved arrays: a JavaScript performance issue”

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

Topics: zig, andrew kelley, cache efficiency, struct of arrays, compilers, performance

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