Mike Acton: OOP is bad

This is a summary of my class learning about why OOP is bad based on Mike Acton’s work. Mike Acton very experienced engine programmer and has been in the game industry for over 22 years. He specializes in engine programming and has worked with sony’s consoles ever since PS1 and helped discover secrets of cell on ps3. Currently resides at insomniac game, and has been programming for their engine for the past 6 years. He has done over a dozen publications about improving programming and recently done a lot of done key notes.

What I got from the lecture

The first point is that if statements are bad due to their branching of code. It is ok if you execute the statement which satisfies the if statement. However when you choose to execute another branch of the statement, you waste more time. That is because rather stepping over to the next point in memory; you would jump to another place. Like in real life you would rather travel in a local area, rather than wasting time going to the airport and flying around! 

Class are bad, even though they help us see better, in the end it is the computer which processes the code. Normally in class there is everything from matrices, to pointers, and other inherited classes. However the computer sees a huge mess of different objects being sent in at once. Each time it encounters a new variable or object, the computer will spend time trying to alocate memory for it, wasting precious computing time.  We should group like objects together and send them through as a stack. This is what computers, specifically SPUs (synergetic processing unit) are made for, and handling huge stacks of work at once. This is why we should move towards a data orient programming for some areas of programming.