Yep, that's the price of simplicity and safety. People talk a lot about stack allocation, but the same issue of pointerful vs flat representation arises in arr

Yep, that's the price of simplicity and safety. People talk a lot about stack allocation, but the same issue of pointerful vs flat representation arises in arrays and records, where it presents even more of a performance issue. Some GCed languages allow a measure of control there: however, Java and OCaml are not among them. People have tried to marry flat representation and safety while allowing things like passing pointers to stack-allocated objects. The results are distinctly baroque (complex notions of region, etc).