Yup, and to a degree the whole "heap references as indexes" idea was inspired by pointer compression. Not in a direct sense of "hey, look at that, what if I too

Yup, and to a degree the whole "heap references as indexes" idea was inspired by pointer compression. Not in a direct sense of "hey, look at that, what if I took it a step further?" but as I was thinking of the indexes I realised that it looks a lot like pointer compression, and that made me think it is a viable idea.