Pointers are everywhere. In real world applications we see an increase between a quarter to a third. For example in 2016 Mozilla reported 25% increase from 32-bit Firefox to 64-bit [1]. Google deemed it necessary to implement pointer compression in Chrome to counter the effect. Java also has pointer compression.
It’s not just a problem for size, don’t forget you also have to copy bits across busses and several layers of cache - and doing so is not instant!
And that’s just thinking in terms of logical RAM. You then have translation tables which pointers need to index into - having them larger makes indexing even more slower, compounding the issue
Pointers are everywhere. In real world applications we see an increase between a quarter to a third. For example in 2016 Mozilla reported 25% increase from 32-bit Firefox to 64-bit [1]. Google deemed it necessary to implement pointer compression in Chrome to counter the effect. Java also has pointer compression.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2016/07/22/firefox-64-b...