This makes fields and decl ast nodes part of the Root and ContainerDecl AST nodes. Surprisingly, it's a performance regression from using a singly-linked list for these nodes: throughput: 76.5 MiB/s => 69.4 MiB/s However it has much better memory usage: maxrss: 392 KB => 77 KB It's also better API for consumers of the parser, since it is a flat list in memory.