We used to call this "seekfree" loading back in games because you could read the whole game level in one chunk without seeking on spinning media. If you wanted

We used to call this "seekfree" loading back in games because you could read the whole game level in one chunk without seeking on spinning media. If you wanted pointers out of it after you loaded it you just had a fix-up phase that swapped the offsets for pointers. We also used the non pointer mmap version on eMMC platforms for really easy ways to store large data while letting the kernel handle the paging with clean pages. Also forces you to think about data locality which is a powerful thing.