Very insightful. I never thought about it like this, but it's common practice in embedded systems to approach problems in this way. One module may provide a statically-sized pool of like objects, and other modules extend behavior in relation to those objects by carrying buffers of pointers and/or indexes into that pool. It might feel inefficient due to the storage of so many pointers/indexes, but you're optimizing the size of the largest thing: the object pool itself.