heh - I built compilers this back in the 70s because the machine I was working on didn't really do pointers as a 1st class data structure (B6700 algol), it's not really surprising finding someone doing something similar in another language that makes pointers difficult to deal with

Yup, and chances are if you're using a good C++ stl implementation, most containers already use packed storage internally. It doesn't even have a heap data structure, it uses an std::vector, with a set of helper functions.