These seem like some fairly standard approaches for reducing memory usage. I can't help to think that the approach of joining several distinct list into a single one in some way undercuts Rust's safety guarantees.
If you previous had three distinct Vec objects, then Rust would guarantee that you can't index out of bounds. If you now put all those objects into a single Vec and rely on offsets, then you now open the door to indexing out of range of these sub-slices without any panics.
It's a minor point, and it doesn't really invalidate the optimization, but I'm surprised the article didn't mention it.
If you previous had three distinct Vec objects, then Rust would guarantee that you can't index out of bounds. If you now put all those objects into a single Vec and rely on offsets, then you now open the door to indexing out of range of these sub-slices without any panics.
It's a minor point, and it doesn't really invalidate the optimization, but I'm surprised the article didn't mention it.