Shaped for the Machine: Arrays, Dynamic Arrays and Memory Layout

Deep End Era. Engineering with Sankalp · Oct 28, 2026 · 51m

Above a bakery in Kraków, game programmer Priya Nandakumar's forty thousand flocking birds run at nineteen frames a second, until her lead Felix tells her to throw away her linked list and split the birds into three arrays. In part two of The Deep End's Data Structures series we find out why that took her to one hundred and forty frames: cache lines, prefetchers, dependent loads and structure-of-arrays layout. We prove amortised doubling with three coins, walk a matrix the slow way and the fast way, and revisit the 1988 Morris worm and 2014 Heartbleed as stories of unchecked indexes. Priya…