This is basically what many functional programming languages do. This always came with plausibly sounding claims that this allows so much better optimizations that this soon will surpass imperative programs in performance, but this never materialized (it still did not - even though Rust fans now adopted this claim, it still isn't quite true). Also control over explicit memory layout is still more important.

Gah, can't believe I forgot about functional programming languages here :(

> even though Rust fans now adopted this claim

Did they? Rust's references seem pretty pointer-like to me on the scale of "has pointers" to "pointers have been entirely removed from the language".

(Obviously Rust has actual pointers as well, but since usefully using them requires unsafe I assume they're out of scope here)

What I meant is that Rust has stricter aliasing rules which make some optimization possible without extra annotations, but this is balanced out by many other issues.

Sure, but I think the presence/absence of aliasing is different from what GP was wondering/asking about, which was the removal of pointers from the programmer-facing model.