DEV Community: Gesee-y

Reactive ECS: A Radical Alternative to Traditional ECS Architectures

Gesee-y — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 13:52:14 +0000

The Entity-Component-System (ECS) model has become the industry standard for game engine design. However, most ECS implementations rely heavily on query-based systems to retrieve relevant entities every frame — an approach that introduces unnecessary overhead and runtime cost.

That's why I propose an alternative architecture: the Reactive ECS.

Instead of querying entities each frame, systems subscribe once to specific combinations of components. A centralized ECSManager then conditionally dispatches the relevant entities to each system, based on these subscriptions. In other words, the only "query" is done up-front, at subscription time.

🚀 Benefits of this approach:

Zero per-frame query cost: Systems receive only what they need, when they need it.
Modular and dynamic: Entities and systems can be added or removed at runtime; the subscription logic handles everything.
Scalable and performant: 1 million entities dispatched to 3 systems in just 980 ns, on a dual-thread CPU.
Better memory locality: Archetype grouping makes processing cache-friendly.
Naturally parallelizable: Systems are decoupled and only receive their relevant data.

You can check the full implementation and architecture (written in Julia) here:

👉 https://github.com/Gesee-y/RECS.jl

Feedback and contributions are welcome!

Game Engine Architecture: An Evolution of the ECS Paradigm

Gesee-y — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 22:47:54 +0000

Game engine architecture is the foundation upon which every feature stands. And like any foundation, if it's weak, everything on top crumbles. A solid, scalable architecture is critical.

Today, ECS (Entity-Component-System) is the dominant model in the industry — but it's not without trade-offs.

So, at first I was doing a funny experiment, making an FNF engine from scratch. But while exploring game architecture, I decided to explore a different take:
A variant of ECS that aims to be:

🚀 Faster (reduced redundant queries)
🔌 Modular and extensible
🧵 Naturally parallelizable
🌐 Better suited for real-time and online systems

This led to what I call RECS — a Reactive ECS written in Julia.
Systems subscribe to archetypes (shapes of components) and get dispatched relevant entities per tick.

📄 Full architecture overview + source code:
👉 https://github.com/Gesee-y/RECS.jl

Would love to get your feedback — and hear how others approach scalable engine design.

A Julia game engine: Cruise

Gesee-y — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 22:43:12 +0000

Hi everyone. I'm here to talk about one of my biggest project, Cruise. It's a flexible and extensible 2D/3D game engine made in Julia. I actually made the window manager ( github.com/Gesee-y/Outdoors.jl ) that's is an API-agnostic windows manager meaning we can use SDL or GLFW window in the same manner and with the same hierarchy.
Next I was working on the renderer engine Horizons ( github.com/Gesee-y/Horizons.jl ) that is supposed to be a multiple backend rendering engine. It's a work in progress but my pc actually died so I can't continue for now.
I am a Cameroonian and I have 17 years old and I would appreciate any feedback on my work, thank for listening to me 😸