Knuth is no longer mailing out checks for $2.56

Re:Knuth is no longer mailing out checks for $2.56 by ced on Thursday October 30, 2008 @12:13PM (#348797)

It is absolutely idiotic to have 64-bit pointers when I compile a program that uses less than 4 gigabytes of RAM. When such pointer values appear inside a struct, they not only waste half the memory, they effectively throw away half of the cache.

Is that true? It's weird to hear Knuth complain about such a down-to-earth problem.

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Re:Knuth is no longer mailing out checks for $2.56 by DarkShikari on Thursday October 30, 2008 @01:12PM (#348860)

This is actually a serious problem when using complex data structures that consist primarily of pointers between memory locations (example: linked lists or trees): this is the one case where 64-bit can actually be significantly slower than 32-bit. Imagine a doubly linked list that contains "int" values: on 32-bit each node would be 96 bits, on 64-bit each node would be 160 bits.

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Re:Knuth is no longer mailing out checks for $2.56 by LogicHoleFlaw on Thursday October 30, 2008 @12:47PM (#348831)

This is a common complaint by games developers too. Blowing half your cache on unused bytes in pointers is really annoying.

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