DGdgellow·Oct 19, 2024Submission
Flecs – A fast entity component system (ECS) for C and C++
2 points · Open discussionSanderMertens
flecs
C2020–2024
SanderMertens / flecs
flecs
A fast entity component system (ECS) for C & C++
11Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
8.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A fast entity component system (ECS) for C & C++
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
- bevyengine/bevy · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year11 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-05-11 09:48:43 UTC to 2024-10-19 17:02:46 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 3 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 2 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
11 sourcesFlecs is a fast and lightweight Entity Component System that lets you build game
1 points · Open discussionI've also been enjoying building My First Game™ in Bevy using ECS. The community around Bevy really shines, but Flecs (https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs) is arguably a more mature, open-source ECS implementation (notably, it supports relationships). You don't get to write in Rust, though, which makes it less cool in my book :)
I'm not very proud of the code I've written because I've found writing a game to be much more confusing than building websites + backends, but, as the author notes, it certainly feels more elegant than OOP or globals given the context. I couldn't imagine trying to build a large game using a more rigid organizational approach.
I'm building for WASM and Bevy's parallelism isn't supported in that context (yet? https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/4078), so the performance wins are just so-so. Sharing a thread
Read the rest
with UI rendering suuucks.
The biggest issues I experience are:
1) How generic should I make my systems? It's easy to make them very specific, but, at a certain specificity, it feels like it's just lazier OOP. More generic and I start spending my time handling edge-cases that don't actually need to exist.
2) Intelligently handling updates when systems run in parallel rather than serially. By default, Bevy runs everything in parallel, and it's heavily encouraged, but my brain finds it a lot easier to just force everything to run serially and to not rely on frame-buffering. This doesn't seem necessarily ECS-specific, though, but is a problem I'm made more aware of due to the defaults given to me.
If anyone wants to browse some code or ask questions, feel free! https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants
Author here: I’m working on another post that describes the inner workings of the query engine in depth! It’s definitely faster than a full scan ;)
In case anyone’s interested, this is the source for it: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs/tree/master/src/addon...
In Thinking of games as databasesWhen do think bevy will support entity-entity relationships ? https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/3742.
Flecs ECS already supports this: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs/blob/master/docs/Rela...
In Bevy and WebGPUthere are several, following slightly different designs [0]. entt and flecs (mix C/C++) are currently the most visible [1]. older and more established engines are getting into the game as well [2].
its just a data point that C++ has constituencies that have not given up on it yet.
[0] https://github.com/topics/ecs?l=c%2B%2B&o=desc&s=forks
[1] https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs
[2] https://github.com/GodotECS
In C++ at the End of 2022Flecs is a fast and lightweight Entity Component System
3 points · Open discussionI'm currently building a game engine using flecs as my ECS: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs
There's lots of great example code in the docs and within the repo itself, for what it's worth!
In The harsh truth of video games programmingFlecs: A Fast and Lightweight Entity Component System for C89 / C99 / C++11
1 points · Open discussionFlecs: High performance Entity Component System for C89/99 and C++11
3 points · Open discussionFlecs, a Multithreaded Entity Component System for C89/99 and C++11
3 points · Open discussion