I think this is a compelling idea, and I did some experiments with it a few years ago, but I don't think it works. I think you have to rewrite all your code in

I think this is a compelling idea, and I did some experiments with it a few years ago, but I don't think it works. I think you have to rewrite all your code in C++ to get smaller pointers, e.g. see my comments on Zig and Sorbet (C++) in this thread. Also some on this wiki page: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Compact-AST-Representation https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Compact-AST-Representat... I don't think there is any way to retrofit existing software with this technique. In addition to the issues you mentioned, you would have to deal with pointer arithmetic (interior pointers), Base* and Derived* semantics (covariance, arrays, templates, etc.), composition with other pointer-like types, etc. Not to mention dealing with external code that doesn't traffic in compressed pointers