Not easily. But not all use cases require it. The regex crate makes heavy use of this pattern for finite machine states, for example. But this fits nicely with an arena allocation pattern, so everything can just be dropped at once.

Despite this, it's one of the fastest regex engines around: https://github.com/BurntSushi/rebar#summary-of-search-time-b...

Here's a related but more isolated analysis: https://github.com/burntsushi/rsc-regexp

I'm not sure whether this is exactly what you mean, but when you need to support deletions you can switch to a "generational" collection like Slab or SlotMap. Your indexes are still integers, but under the covers some of the bits get repurposed to disambiguate new elements that reuse old slots.