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I find the name data-oriented design very confusing - it sounds like data-driven development (letting hard data determine decisions in development) or data-driven programming (control flow determined by loaded data and not hard coded), except it's something completely different: designing for current cache-dominated CPU architectures combined with an emphasis on making a few highly-reusable functions.

It seems to me that there are a number of other names that better convey what it actually is:

  • (Cache|[CPU] Architecture|Layout)-(Oriented|Optimized) (Design|Development|Programming): that's 24 options that all convey that it is about optimizing your coding for the way CPU caches work.
  • Database-inspired design: This implicitly conveys the cache-optimized design, as databases are often optimized for that, and also suggests the use of the reusable transforms on the data. It seems to me, based on the data-oriented design book, that this is what the approach actually is as well, though I am more partial to the above as they convey why it actually works (because the way your data is arranged in memory lends itself to efficient prefetching of data and tries to minimize the number of hard to predict branches in the instructions that process it).
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    I guess mean "data oriented design" as defined by Wikipedia. I take the freedom and add a link to that article to your question, please double check that you had the same in mind. Next time you ask a question, I would recommend to add such references by yourself.
    – Doc Brown
    Commented Sep 5 at 8:10
  • @DocBrown thank you, yes that is what I meant. Sorry for not including it, I initially tried to post it to StackOverflow, which has a data-oriented design tag so it would already have been clear.
    – Sir Nate
    Commented Sep 5 at 16:37
  • I'm pretty sure that data-oriented design is what started out as the data-driven development movement, but when they realized that the DDD acronym was already taken (and widely understood to stand for Domain Driven Design), they changed what they call it.
    – Filip Milovanović
    Commented Sep 6 at 0:59
  • @FilipMilovanović This sort of data-driven development, or a different kind? devtalents.com/data-driven-software-development
    – Sir Nate
    Commented Sep 6 at 1:45
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    No, that seams like manager/marketing speak - I don't know if that particular use of the term is widespread. I was referring more to these ideas coming from the game industry & the C++ community. To some extent, these arose in reaction (or in opposition) to OOP - or at least, in reaction to how OOP is often practiced (and many of their insights are really good, but they also misunderstand OO design, so some of the objections are a strawman fallacy, and some of what they are saying is framed in anti-OOP language).
    – Filip Milovanović
    Commented Sep 6 at 3:12

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For a moment I was going to ask what the question actually was, then I remembered it was in title.

I agree "data-oriented design" is a pretty obtuse and uppity term.

The term seems to originate from being defined in contrast to "object-oriented design" where an object is thought of as code and data defined together in source code and handled together at runtime.

Proponents of DOD basically argue that OOD is inefficient in the execution (their area seems to be game development and high-performance C++), and (underneath a veneer of new-fangled terminology) advocate a return to old-style procedural design concepts where data structures exist separately from the algorithms which operate on them, though the two are still designed to mate together efficiently, and where programs are designed in ways that are most efficient for execution on a particular computer architecture (rather than conforming to generic OOD diktats).

In briefly researching this, I also noticed terminology used like "array of structures" and "structure of arrays", which basically correspond to what is known as "rowstore" and "columnstore" in database engine contexts (also frequently "row-major" and "column-major" more broadly), and which is all concerned with the same issues about how maximise the locality of storage for certain access patterns.

In essence, DOD is just not-OOD.

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