On Saturday, 7 May 2016 at 06:08:01 UTC, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
In Dicebot's DConf talk he mentioned that it is possible to use
the top 16 bits for tagging pointers and the associated risks.
Regarding the GC not seeing a pointer if the top 16 bits are
used, whats to stop us from changing the GC to (or adding an
option to) ignore those bits when checking?
I imagine that it would cause a lot more false pointers, but
when we get precise GC that problem would go away.
I would not rely on it *at all* actually, even now. I do not
think it would make D portable to every system (let's not only
consider x86 architecture).
We don't know how a system would choose to map physical memory
and hardware devices to virtual memory.
