Comment by specialist

I think you're on to something (important). Decomposing structs into separate arrays (heaps) is becoming a thing. eg Rust and others are introducing language features to manually (explicitly) do so. It could be cool if the runtime just handled it.

I stumbled across a new research language with new syntax for just this purpose, to better express iteration and lambdas. IIRC.

Sorry, I was looking for something else (got nerdsniped by u/hinkley's mention of Erlang's "set-theoric types" ), and didn't bookmark it. If I find it again, I'll forward the link.

Maybe someone else here knows what I'm talking about.