> I'd love to see examples of "ahead" coz I literally never saw it.
Game developers were deeply aware of data-oriented design and optimizing code and data structures for efficient CPU cache usage well before I saw most other areas of industry aware of it. You can find counter-examples, of course, but overall, this is an area of performance that many game developers understand in their bones, and many programmers outside of games—even ones who care a lot about performance—are oblivious too.
Depends on which side you look from. If you look from embedded realtime development side it might be game developers being behind and rest of the industry REALLY behind.
Game is essentially soft realtime system that needs to deliver frame every 16.6ms or gamer is unhappy. Very few pieces of software does optimization like game development does because it is just not that often needed.
Game developers were deeply aware of data-oriented design and optimizing code and data structures for efficient CPU cache usage well before I saw most other areas of industry aware of it. You can find counter-examples, of course, but overall, this is an area of performance that many game developers understand in their bones, and many programmers outside of games—even ones who care a lot about performance—are oblivious too.