> Everyone wants to use the fanciest data structures when most of the times arrays will be faster and simpler to use.
I'm not sure I comprehend this, since I don't often encounter code where people use advanced data structures to do simple things. For most collections, you're typically talking about an array of some kind, since you just want to iterate through many objects doing the same thing. However, there is a reason for more complex data structures to exist. KDTrees, for example, are great for performing nearest-neighbour search, and I can't see any situation where I'd want to use a straight array if I knew I was doing nearest-neighbour searches.
In the most broad, general case I agree: array-of-struct or struct-of-arrays is probably the way to go. You can even see this in the data science world where data frames (effectively struct-of-arrays) are the tool of the trade. However, there are algorithms where if you want an advanced data structure, you really want it (e.g. KDTree). Is it really so common in systems programming to see people trying to incorporate all sorts of magic from The Art of Computer Programming into their programs? I can't say I've ever seen it myself (obvious disclaimer that while I'm a programmer by trade I don't read too many large Rust / C++ projects).
I'm not sure I comprehend this, since I don't often encounter code where people use advanced data structures to do simple things. For most collections, you're typically talking about an array of some kind, since you just want to iterate through many objects doing the same thing. However, there is a reason for more complex data structures to exist. KDTrees, for example, are great for performing nearest-neighbour search, and I can't see any situation where I'd want to use a straight array if I knew I was doing nearest-neighbour searches.
In the most broad, general case I agree: array-of-struct or struct-of-arrays is probably the way to go. You can even see this in the data science world where data frames (effectively struct-of-arrays) are the tool of the trade. However, there are algorithms where if you want an advanced data structure, you really want it (e.g. KDTree). Is it really so common in systems programming to see people trying to incorporate all sorts of magic from The Art of Computer Programming into their programs? I can't say I've ever seen it myself (obvious disclaimer that while I'm a programmer by trade I don't read too many large Rust / C++ projects).