# Objective
Archetype is a deceptively large type in memory. It stores metadata about which components are in which storage in multiple locations, which is only used when creating new Archetypes while moving entities.
## Solution
Remove the redundant `Box<[ComponentId]>`s and iterate over the sparse set of component metadata instead. Reduces Archetype's size by 4 usizes (32 bytes on 64-bit systems), as well as the additional allocations for holding these slices.
It'd seem like there's a downside that the origin archetype has it's component metadata iterated over twice when creating a new archetype, but this change also removes the extra `Vec<ArchetypeComponentId>` allocations when creating a new archetype which may amortize out to a net gain here. This change likely negatively impacts creating new archetypes with a large number of components, but that's a cost mitigated by the fact that these archetypal relationships are cached in Edges and is incurred only once for each edge created.
## Additional Context
There are several other in-flight PRs that shrink Archetype:
- #4800 merges the entities and rows Vecs together (shaves off 24 bytes per archetype)
- #4809 removes unique_components and moves it to it's own dedicated storage (shaves off 72 bytes per archetype)
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## Changelog
Changed: `Archetype::table_components` and `Archetype::sparse_set_components` return iterators instead of slices. `Archetype::new` requires iterators instead of parallel slices/vecs.
## Migration Guide
Do I still need to do this? I really hope people were not relying on the public facing APIs changed here.
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