RLrlupi·Dec 22, 2024
Good insight.
Ah... category theory :-)
Array-of-Stuct (AoS) treats order in arrays as meaningful, arrays as lists, so AoS => Struct-of-Array (SoA) doesn't loose information. It is a sound transformation because it is a homomorphism.
Some languages (homoiconic, or with macros or template support) can express this code transformation: e.g. Julia, https://github.com/JuliaArrays/StructArrays.jl, or Rust, https://www.abubalay.com/blog/2019/02/16/struct-of-arrays
In a sense, you can see this transformation through the concept of monads (although Haskell monads or F# computational expressions cannot directly express it, as far as I know). Then the corresponding category diagrams leads to sets or multi-sets (run-length encoding requires or implies some concept of identity, so unordered lists with repetitions = bags and multi-sets are equivalent
Read the rest
in this specific context), as the right concept for Enums of Arrays.