Comment by inigyou
18 hours ago
> You need a generation counter in there too, or else the array indice may get reused if something is deleted and another thing is reinserted at the same index.
It's really sounding like you're pretending not to know what your program does, which is one of the core OOP ideas that DOD refutes. In OOP you have an array of Shape and you pretend not to know which shapes your program implements, so the only way to draw them is to call ->draw() on each one. And you pretend you don't know anything about the lifetime of a shape so you use smart pointers everywhere to extend it as long as needed. In DOD you assert that you do know what shapes are available and what their lifetimes are.
I certainly don't know "what my program does" if it's a game where, at every frame of the simulation, thousands of entities might or might not be created, deleted and recycled depending on player inputs.
Can you describe a superior replacement for generation counters?
If you don't know what your program does, DOD asserts that you are a bad programmer and you should first figure out what your program does before continuing.
Sounds like you're writing a game engine, not a game?
This is such a good explanation of OOP vs DOD