List of objects or parallel arrays of properties?
- by Headcrab
The question is, basically: what would be more preferable, both performance-wise and design-wise - to have a list of objects of a Python class or to have several lists of numerical properties?
I am writing some sort of a scientific simulation which involves a rather large system of interacting particles. For simplicity, let's say we have a set of balls bouncing inside a box so each ball has a number of numerical properties, like x-y-z-coordinates, diameter, mass, velocity vector and so on. How to store the system better? Two major options I can think of are:
to make a class "Ball" with those properties and some methods, then store a list of objects of the class, e. g. [b1, b2, b3, ...bn, ...], where for each bn we can access bn.x, bn.y, bn.mass and so on;
to make an array of numbers for each property, then for each i-th "ball" we can access it's 'x' coordinate as xs[i], 'y' coordinate as ys[i], 'mass' as masses[i] and so on;
To me it seems that the first option represents a better design. The second option looks somewhat uglier, but might be better in terms of performance, and it could be easier to use it with numpy and scipy, which I try to use as much as I can.
I am still not sure if Python will be fast enough, so it may be necessary to rewrite it in C++ or something, after initial prototyping in Python. Would the choice of data representation be different for C/C++? What about a hybrid approach, e.g. Python with C++ extension?
