Re: [boost] interest in structure of arrays container?

On 10/14/2016 09:43 PM, Michael Marcin wrote:

Structure of arrays is a pretty well known pattern for improving memory density and enabling vectorization in high performance code. Also known as parallel arrays[1].

After hand-rolling yet another of these it occurred to me that you make a reasonable first implementation with a simple alias template.

template< typename... Ts > using soa = std::tuple< std::vector<Ts>... >;

example: soa data;

This is decent start but has several issues including: * nothing to preserve the invariant keeping the arrays the same length * missing coalesced interface for vector methods (size, reserve, etc) * no iterator * wasted storage for duplicated allocators, capacities, sizes * sizeof...(Ts) allocations could be a single large block

The work required to address these issues is not too great I think.

The purpose of item: * sizeof...(Ts) allocations could be a single large block is to just require 1 heap allocation instead of N, where N is the number of vectors in soa? -regards, Larry