This article reminds me (on the surface, this is deeper than my experience) of how the recent Goose language orients things.
I never worked with it but I seem to recall the old original Mac API's (Pascal based) used "handles" a lot to solve the issue of being able for the system to move allocations and memory out from under a program without it knowing, as a "pointer to pointer to <thing>". I was poring over those manuals in ~1988/1989 with visions of being a full-time Mac developer in my head.
I remember back in the day in Windows C++ programming everything was a HANDLE memory is probably not serving me, but they were all really just void* renamed. And you use them with various win32 functions I guess to keep things straight. I don't miss those days.
The good thing is that all of these can and have been quite neatly put into RAII[1] or some memory arena with custom deleters which use the Win32 functions. One could manually `delete` those handles, but there be dragons. Vulkan does something similar; everything is a VkSomething handle. They may just be pointers directly exposed by the driver, but even so, users are explicitly supposed to use vkDeleteSomething functions to delete them.
and why game engines use entity-component systems, analytical databases are column-oriented, etc. That is, the classical organization of "objects" as structures has a lot of overhead when you're doing heavy work. For instance java reifies objects with a big header, a monitor lock, and other stuff that really adds up if you, say, are writing a chess engine and need to maintain transposition tables. And even if you are in C++ and there is a lot less overhead, AoS still has bad mechanical sympathy compared to SoA.
I never worked with it but I seem to recall the old original Mac API's (Pascal based) used "handles" a lot to solve the issue of being able for the system to move allocations and memory out from under a program without it knowing, as a "pointer to pointer to <thing>". I was poring over those manuals in ~1988/1989 with visions of being a full-time Mac developer in my head.
The good thing is that all of these can and have been quite neatly put into RAII[1] or some memory arena with custom deleters which use the Win32 functions. One could manually `delete` those handles, but there be dragons. Vulkan does something similar; everything is a VkSomething handle. They may just be pointers directly exposed by the driver, but even so, users are explicitly supposed to use vkDeleteSomething functions to delete them.
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/wil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AoS_and_SoA
and why game engines use entity-component systems, analytical databases are column-oriented, etc. That is, the classical organization of "objects" as structures has a lot of overhead when you're doing heavy work. For instance java reifies objects with a big header, a monitor lock, and other stuff that really adds up if you, say, are writing a chess engine and need to maintain transposition tables. And even if you are in C++ and there is a lot less overhead, AoS still has bad mechanical sympathy compared to SoA.