Converting vector-backed float columns to Vec3x4?

[recatek]

Apologies if this is covered in the docs somewhere, I wasn't able to find anything about best practices on this.

Is there a helper function, or some guidance on the best way to store floats in columns, e.g.

struct Entities {
    pos_x: Vec<f32>,
    pos_y: Vec<f32>,
    pos_z: Vec<f32>,
}

but convert them into Vec3x4 chunks (with some possible remaining Vec3s) for processing?

I'm guessing some use of chunks_exact and remainder would work here -- iterate each column in chunks of 4, get an f32x4 from each chunk (is there an easy conversion for this?), convert the three zipped f32x4s into a Vec3x4, perform operations, and then break it all apart again to store the result, with some special cases for the remaining <4 f32s into a regular Vec3. Is this ever done in practice? Is it worth it? It would be nice to preserve the ability to easily access a single entity's (x, y, z) from those columns.

[fu5ha]

Not really. I'm not sure what the best way is and I'm not sure that it would be worth it, either. Lots of random-ish memory access and copying to do this. If you want to process with Vec3x4 then should just store as pos: Vec<Vec3x4> probably. But I haven't measured, either