I'm interested in that too! I want to be able to decouple the 'declarative structure' of my data from its concrete representation in memory.
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You might find this post interesting. It's about representation polymorphism in Perl 6 - not sure what Raku does these days though:
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There was also this paper: “You can have it all: abstraction and good cache performance” dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/31 which talks abstracting over struct of arrays (SoA) vs array of structs (AoS) representations.
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There was also a follow up paper by the same group which seemed interesting: “Reshape your layouts, not your programs: A safe language extension for better cache locality”
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I've also wondered if somehow you could levitate data descriptions, and then map those to low level memory layouts - thinking of how Rust has different optimizations packing structs and tagged unions, for example. Would be cool if the user could have control over that.
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my language cogent has (or is getting) that. Data layout is separate from type structure and you can choose them independently.
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Oh nice!! Is there any examples/documentation about this online?
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You probably don't want to use Cogent unless you plan on verifying OS components, but the feature is fairly new. There is a position paper on it from a while ago ts.data61.csiro.au/publications/c
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Nice, thanks! More looking for inspiration than anything. And yeah, I think I remember this paper - it had really cool diagrams! Thanks for the reminder!