Note that it's not like with CHERI you can't cast a pointer to int or something. Sure you can, that's one of the main accomplishments: to demonstrate that hard

Note that it's not like with CHERI you can't cast a pointer to int or something. Sure you can, that's one of the main accomplishments: to demonstrate that hardware capabilities can work with real-world source code, like PostgreSQL. So, it's not like you can't typecast; rather, there are some specific things the hardware will prevent you from doing, eg '(void *)42' - if you force clang to accept it, it will crash at runtime due to missing tag. CHERI C programming guide might be helpful: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-947.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-947.pdf