bearophile wrote:
Walter Bright:
Frits van Bommel:
[1]: Hey, x86 technically has 6-byte pointers if you count segments as
part of the pointer (which would be mostly useless on currently popular
operating systems though).
It does, but I know of no compiler that supports that (C, C++, or any
other), and code that needs to deal with that tends to be assembler.
16 free bits suggest various possible usages, for example the length for small
strings/arrays, halving the size of the array struct.
Bye,
bearophile
They're not free bits. Those bits are in the segment registers, not in
the pointer registers. Only the OS can change the segment registers. And
it's a slow operation.
