Yeah I find the thing you generally want but which many languages don’t support well is to have a struct-of-arrays or data frame layout rather than an array of objects. Then you can do one of:
Sort one array and rearrange other arrays the same way
Compute the array of indices into another array such that array[index[i]] < array[index[i+1]], I.e. the sorted version of the array is then [array[i] for i in index]. If you have a vectorised index operation (eg APL, R, …) getting the sorted array is one line of code.
I think with simd you’d want to sort your array and simultaneously permute either a second array or the array of indices 1, 2, …, n so you can use that to do accesses to corresponding elements in your other associated columns.
Sort one array and rearrange other arrays the same way
Compute the array of indices into another array such that array[index[i]] < array[index[i+1]], I.e. the sorted version of the array is then [array[i] for i in index]. If you have a vectorised index operation (eg APL, R, …) getting the sorted array is one line of code.
I think with simd you’d want to sort your array and simultaneously permute either a second array or the array of indices 1, 2, …, n so you can use that to do accesses to corresponding elements in your other associated columns.