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Wouldn’t structs of arrays affect cache locality adversely, if say you’re say reading and processing the data in sequential order? You’d have to jump between memory addresses that are pretty far apart to read in a single record / set of fields, and potentially trigger cache misses since they’re likely spread out across different memory pages and you end up filling your L1/L2/L3 cache?

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it depends on the access pattern. If you are performing an operation where you need to access every field on each object, then yes you'd be better off with array of structs. But at least in games, it seems more common that you'd need to e.g. get just the x-y coords of every monster, in which case struct-of-arrays is better.

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