[....] I suppose it's possible that on some weird platform a pointer mat not fit in long. In gcj was have a class RawData, which we know points to something that isn't an Object and isn't gcable.
Jikes RVM abstracts this away with a similar class, VM_Address. And, as you said, Andrew, it would be very bad if it leaked into application code.
One day -- I have difficulty imagining it -- we are going to have processors that use an address space more than 64 bits wide. Then again, in 1984 the VAX's 32-bit (4 GB) address space seemed huge.
Just as C is still in common use today, I expect that there will still be running Java code out there when we go over 64 bits of address space. I further expect that a descendant of at least one of the Free Java projects we discuss on this list will be out there running Java code.
--
Steven Augart
Jikes RVM, a free, open source, Virtual Machine: http://oss.software.ibm.com/jikesrvm
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