5 ms·
True, but, the advantage of using 32 bit pointers to save a couple of RAM is not that important, since applications typically don't use that much pointers, thus
by alerighi 1y ago
True, but, the advantage of using 32 bit pointers to save a couple of RAM is not that important, since applications typically don't use that much pointers, thus if you half the size of them you will save probably a couple of kb of RAM.
Maintaining the support for a different architecture only for that doesn't make a lot of sense, probably the reason it was never supported. RAM is cheap these days so...
- weinzierl 1y ago"probably a couple of kb" Pointers are everywhere. In real world applications we see an increase between a quarter to a third. For example in 2016 Mozilla reported 25% increase from 32-bit Firefox to 64-bit [1]. Google deemed it necessary to implement pointer compression in Chrome to counter the effect. Java also has pointer compression. [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2016/07/22/firefox-64-bit-for-windows-can-take-advantage-of-more-memory/ https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2016/07/22/firefox-64-b...
- alfiedotwtf 1y agoIt’s not just a problem for size, don’t forget you also have to copy bits across busses and several layers of cache - and doing so is not instant! And that’s just thinking in terms of logical RAM. You then have translation tables which pointers need to index into - having them larger makes indexing even more slower, compounding the issue
- karmakaze 1y agoIt can be important, but also there are ways of using compressed pointers on 64-bit systems for similar savings. Search/prompt "What modern systems or programming/runtime environments use compressed pointers of some form?" for details.