Change Note 2026-07-13

Entity Component System (ECS) for real-time control – an exploratory evaluation

ECS for Control – An Evaluation

A new, exploratory strand: an evaluation of whether – and how – an Entity Component System (ECS) architecture fits real-time control programs written in Astrobe Oberon. It comprises four documents and a family of eight example programs, based on lib/v3.2.

This is evaluation work, not part of the core framework: it reflects my current understanding, the concepts and their framing may still change, and none of it is a specification.

The documents:

• ECS for Control — Concepts and Motivation – what the architecture is, and why its structure is worth examining for real-time control.

• EcsControlBase (v0–v7) – the eight EcsControlBase variants, each isolating one facet of the design.

• ECS for Control — Lessons Learned – what building the variants taught, at the concept and the implementation level.

• ECS for Control — Outlook – where the evaluation goes next.

Example Programs

• The EcsControlBase variants are in <repo>/examples/v3.2/rpi/pico2/EcsControlBase/EcsControlBase-v0 … -v7, for the RP2350 (Pico2), based on lib/v3.2.

• Each variant is a self-contained copy of the whole program, so the single aspect that changes from one to the next reads as a direct diff against its predecessor.

• All variants compile and run on the target hardware.

Last updated: 13 July 2026