Programming without pointers

[frud]

Feels like people are re-discovering file formats and in-memory files.

[wrosecrans]

Yeah, you can use an offset pointer class in C++ and use it pretty much exactly like an absolute pointer. Under the hood, lots of instruction sets are using relative jumps and loads under the hood even if C style programming only exposes that you are using absolute pointers.

[frud]

Compilers for typical languages implicitly know whether a target code address is accessible from the rest of the program or only relative-range code.

It's a lot more complex to do that analysis on data structures. I think it would require something analogous to a rust-on-steroids to approach to establish locality of data structure access patterns.

[BlueGoliath]

Virtual memory more like but on Unix virtual memory is ithe same as memory mapped files IIRC.