Depends on what you define as "do this". It's pretty common for pointer heavy datastructures to replace the pointers with a narrower offset, and then a single b

Depends on what you define as "do this". It's pretty common for pointer heavy datastructures to replace the pointers with a narrower offset, and then a single base pointer which the offsets are added/subtracted to. If the compiler can be convinced to keep the base pointer in a register through dereference heavy code, the cost is often negligible. And more than won back by better cache efficiency.