As someone who did way too much with handles in early Mac and Windows programming, I'll say they're definitely not 'better', but for some (mostly memory constra

As someone who did way too much with handles in early Mac and Windows programming, I'll say they're definitely not 'better', but for some (mostly memory constrained) environments, they have some advantages. You get to compress memory, sure, but now you've got extra locking and stale pointer complexity to deal with. If you _need_ the relocatability and don't have memory mapping, then maybe they're for you, but otherwise, there are usually better options.