[Haskell-cafe] Re: compressed pointers?

[Simon Marlow]

Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Ketil,
> 
> Friday, April 18, 2008, 10:44:53 AM, you wrote:
> 
>> This probably becomes too complicated, but I thought it was
>> interesting that the Java people are making use of 32bit pointers on a
>> 64bit system, and are seeing a good performance benefit from it.
> 
> afaik, C compilers support this model too, so it shouldn't too hard to
> compile GHC in such mode. it's a bit like small/large memory models of
> those 16-bit x86 systems :)

Except that you'd need to compile all your libraries in that mode too. 
The reason Java can do this is I imagine because they JIT all the code 
at runtime so they can change some aspects of code-generation strategy 
without recompiling everything.

Cheers,
	Simon