[torginus]

Personally I think this is a neat trick to organize memory, but don't these kinds of objects packed together in flat buffers bypass the entire lifetime and safety mechanism of Rust?

I mean if you do an off by one error on indices, essentially you are readin the pointer of another node.

[loeg]

This is a common argument about Rust. Unlike pointer confusion, with index confusion, you still get bounds checking in the containing collection, and you also avoid type confusion (the wrong index element will still have the same type as the object you intended to access). So there are still some benefits.

[torginus]

> This is a common argument about Rust.

Because it is a correct one. std::vector can do this in debug mode, Zig and a bunch of other languages do as well. But that's not the point of why memory safety's important. You opt out of all aliasing and lifetime checks this way, which means an easy off-by one indexing bug (which would be a compiler error otherwise), silently propagates through the system, and you can reference wrong nodes, invalid nodes, uninitalized nodex.

It's even worse in some aspects that a dangling pointer, because you can quickly tell a dangling pointer contains garbage data, but here, the stuff looks plausible.

I am not sure this is a critique of Rust - this certainly goes against the grain of how the language has been designed - which in the case of Rust, might make things easier, since lifetimes are not checked for individual elements, but also less safe.

[loeg]

I don't think this argument is useful to rehash here. That said:

> you can reference wrong nodes, invalid nodes, uninitalized nodex.

No, you cannot access uninitialized nodes in safe Rust.