[obl]

It is not ridiculous at all. Those things have pretty precise definitions and type segregation absolutely does remove a bunch of soundness issues related to type confusion.

You can think of it as the rather classic "Vec of struct + numeric IDs" that is used a lot e.g. in Rust to represent complex graph-like structures.

This combined with bound checking is absolutely memory safe. It has a bunch of correctness issue that can arise due to index confusion but those are not safety issues. When combined with some kind of generational counters those correctness issue also go away but are only caught at runtime not at compile time (and they incur a runtime cost).

Rust's memory safety is about avoiding liveness issues (that become type confusions since all memory allocators will reuse memory for different types), nothing more, nothing less.

[gpderetta]

> but those are not safety issues.

there are not memory safety issues. But they definitely can lead to security issues with some sort of confused deputy attack.

For example a capability based system that relied on just this form of memory safety would be pointless.

Of course this can be mitigated by adding version counters to objects and object selectors.

[jandrewrogers]

FWIW, arrays of structs + integer handles is the primary way objects are represented in performance-engineered C++.