Entity Component System in Go

Introduction

This is my attempt to build a high-performance ECS (Entity, Component, System) engine in pure Go. Having investigated other ECS systems which have been written to date, I realised that none of them is really a pure ECS as the data layout is often using pointers or interfaces, which would discard most of the benefits of such a system.

Entities

Entities in this system are represented with the Entity struct as opposed to a simple identifier (which they also have). The main reason behind this is to support cleanly deleting an entity from all of the component managers.

Component Generation

The components are protected through a generated "component manager" which can be found in component package. In order to generate one, I used genny which can be used with go generate as well (see component/generic.go).

Benchmarks

The benchmark results below seem promising. Below are the results of both view and update functions that iterate over 1 million components, resulting in around 1.5ns per item. I would encourage you to experiment and help me improve this.

// Benchmark_Component/view-8         	     790	   1537626 ns/op	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
// Benchmark_Component/update-8       	     775	   1505681 ns/op	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op