Faster arrays of components

[jonniedie]

Arrays of components in a ComponentArray unpack pretty slowly because they allocate. Something like this:

boid = ComponentArray(pos=zeros(2), vel=zeros(2))

boid_box = ComponentArray(pos=zeros(2), vel=zeros(2), θ=0, ω=0)

u0 = ComponentArray(boid_box=boid_box, boids=repeat([boid], 100))

Right now, doing u0.boids would allocate and be too expensive to use.

Maybe the right answer is StaticArrays. They wouldn't be able to be used for very large arrays of components, but it would at least it would make them useful for some problems.

[jonniedie]

StaticArrays didn't work so well. Ended up rolling my own LazyArray type for this based on Base.Generator.