[hansvm]

By all means. It's a pattern I use all the time, not just in Rust (often getting away with much less than 32-bit indices). You mentioned this and/or alluded to it, but my core complaints are:

1. You don't have much choice in the matter

2. When implementing that strategy, the default (happy path coding) is that you have almost zero choice in when the underlying memory is reclaimed

It's a pattern that doesn't have to be leaky, but especially when you're implementing it in Rust to circumvent borrow-checker limitations, most versions I've seen have been very leaky, not even supporting shrink/resize/reset/... operations to try to at least let the user manually be more careful with leaks.

[baq]

You should probably use something like https://docs.rs/generational-arena/latest/generational_arena... when you want to do this.

I understand the problem isn’t that the tools exist, it’s that there are Rust users who are not aware of the concept and its evolution over the years, which I’d argue is not a uniquely Rust issue.