"Yair Lifshitz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > On a different note, it is actually hard to decide which pointers can > be compressed at the compilation level (without user intervention) > seeing as some pointers are actually <8-byte aligned (i.e. char-s) and > forward declarations can make it impossible to discover.
Sounds reasonable. But if you do it I would really recommend to implement compiler support (or only use it with C++) so that the compiler always handles it based on the type declaration. AmigaOS for historical reasons (compatibility to BCPL[1]) had a similar type of special pointer (BPTRs) and dealing with it in C with special access macros was always very painful. -Andi [1] BCPL was typeless, and to make x++ work correctly on a pointer on a 32bit machine the pointers were always stored shifted down by 2 bits in the BCPL compiler where originally parts of AmigaOS were written in.
