[nightcracker]

SlotMap literally cannot, because it must keep track of versions of the used slots, and the slots include the memory space for the data.

DenseSlotMap sort of can. It still can't reclaim the memory used by empty slots for the same reason (at a cost of 8 bytes per slot), but can reclaim the memory used by the actual elements stored.

So if you store 1 million items at one point in a DenseSlotMap, and then clear them all and then shrink to fit (which is actually missing from the API, but I'll fix that soon) you will waste 7.6 megabytes on the empty slots but nothing on the actual data that used to be stored.