4 ms·

What is the reason for using product of all primitive types for boxing instead of tagged union?

• artagnon 12y ago
  Because one type may use more than one field. Vectors and strings use the nr field additionally, and functions use the vector/fenv field additionally. Instead of creating a hierarchy, I figured a flat structure would be easier to understand.
  • thinkpad20 12y ago
    I was going to ask about this as well. It seems like there's a lot of wasted space in how things are represented. The first field already tells you what type of object you're dealing with. Since you're using 64-bit integers, you could represent pointers, bools, ints and floats all in the same memory space. I guess there might be some types that use more than one field, but certainly a bool is not going to. There's also the issue of alignment with the usage of 1-bit and 1-byte types...