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Sep 19, 2022 at 06:20
A decent part of VMs being faster than AST interpreters is just memory layout AIUI. VM instructions are largely flat arrays, so there's less pointer chasing.

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Jan 9, 2023 at 05:50
Today I learnt that Cell<T> has the size of a pointer (i.e. probably 64 bits) in Rust, regardless of the size of T. It's a common pattern for making struct fields mutable, but the T isn't actually stored inside the struct.
Nov 13, 2022 at 10:10
Is there any way of doing tagged references in safe Rust? I've been looking at tagged pointers (the crate https://docs.rs/tagged-pointer/latest/tagged_pointer/ looks excellent) but it gives you back a raw pointer. I'm not sure if you can create a safe wrapper for references using tagged pointers.
tagged_pointer - Rust
This crate provides an implementation of tagged pointers: a space-efficient representation of a pointer and integer tag. In particular, both `TaggedPtr` and `Option<TaggedPtr>` are the size of a pointer despite containing both a pointer and tag.
May 3, 2022 at 05:20
"What do you call a pointer we stole the high bits off? An ointer." https://docs.rs/ointers/latest/ointers/ Brilliant name for a pointer tagging library.
ointers - Rust
What do you call a pointer we stole the high bits off? An ointer.