Comment by jasonwatkinspdx

That's very much the norm in the game dev world, especially for someone like Jonathan who's been doing this since the early era of PC gaming.

You've got 16 ms to get that next frame rendered, so stuffing everything into fixed sized tables and linear walks is a simple way to structure against that limit. You've got an entity budget of so many, and there's no unpredictable delays from dynamic allocation or similar.

Even when using scripting languages that offer more flexibility, like LUA or C#, you see a tendency towards this pattern.