store many of relation 1:1 between various type of objects : decoupling & high performance

Question

I have 300+ classes. They are related in some ways.

For simplicity, all relation are 1:1.
Here is a sample diagram.

(In real case, there are aroun

Answer 1

There is and can be no good answer to this question, since your algorithm is not known. What can be said in general, is that you want locality on your data and indirection is always a way to break it.

If you have an algorithm, that works on hens, you want them to be packed as closely as possible and ideally to be linear in memory, for the maximum cache hit rate.

If your algorithm needs to work on the relation, between hens and eggs. They need to be local. This can not be achieved by saving them as pointers in the hens, but you need an array of all hen <-> egg relation.

You see, it relly depends on what you intend to do. If you really aim to gain high permance, you have to prevent deep indiretion. Every pointer, you try to resolve may trash a cache line. If your cpu, is only chasing them down, the performance will be very low.