Top all-time · #11120
Sander Mertens
Personal blog · ajmmertens.medium.comprogramminggames
Sander Mertens's personal blog at ajmmertens.medium.com covers programming and games. Since 2021, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “Building Games in ECS with Entity Relationships”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Sander Mertens's Medium posts on entity component system and data-oriented game engine design, including ideas drawn from database techniques and his FLECS project.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Building Games in ECS with Entity Relationships4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-04-07
- Why it is time to start thinking of games as databases2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-06-06
What Hacker News says?
You're not alone: the Bevy community's been exploring this too, both on the application side and the ECS-innovation side. The query caching is a neat trick that learns directly from DB's. Some of our most anticipated planned ECS features include secondary indexes (for things like looking up all entities in a particular cell) and relations (components that also point to another entity, inspired by FLECS[0]). 0: https…
Comment linking /flecs-v2-3-and-v2-2-is-out-893d7888b508
on “Bevy 0.5: data oriented game engine built in Rust”Submitted Building an ECS #3: Storage in Pictures as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThis is another excellent read https://ajmmertens.medium.com/why-it-is-time-to-start-thinki...
Comment linking /why-it-is-time-to-start-thinking-of-games-as-databases-e7971da33ac3
on “Revy – proof-of-concept time-travel debugger for the Bevy game engine”Submitted Flecs v4.0 Is Out as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThe same goes for Flecs: - it has tools like https://github.com/flecs-hub/explorer that work with any Flecs project - it has builtin support for hierarchies/prefabs and more ( https://ajmmertens.medium.com/building-games-in-ecs-with-ent... ) - it has optional support for systems/scheduling - it has an optional reflection framework - it has an optional DSL for describing assets/scenes, with an online playground to tr…
Comment linking /building-games-in-ecs-with-entity-relationships-657275ba2c6c
on “Flecs – A fast entity component system for C and C++”Submitted Why it is time to start thinking of games as databases as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm definitely not going to argue that you need ECS to do much of anything, but ECS has come long way in the past 4 years from a tool that lets you have lots of entities in a game, to a more generic system for entity management. Things like entity relationships ( https://ajmmertens.medium.com/building-games-in-ecs-with-ent... ) introduced features that were already common in existing entity management systems, such…
Comment linking /building-games-in-ecs-with-entity-relationships-657275ba2c6c
on “Flecs – A fast entity component system for C and C++”Submitted How to build fast hierarchies for game objects using data oriented design as a story · 2 points
HN discussionPretty close, but there's a bit more to it. This post goes over one way an ECS can store data: https://ajmmertens.medium.com/building-an-ecs-2-archetypes-a...
Comment linking /building-an-ecs-2-archetypes-and-vectorization-fe21690805f9
on “Flecs – A fast entity component system for C and C++”Submitted Building Games in ECS with Entity Relationships as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building Games in ECS with Entity Relationships as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building Games in ECS with Entity Relationships as a story · 1 points
HN discussion