Pointers don't have to be the exception. I'm working on a programming language runtime where objects are stored as a 32-bit value, with 3/4 of the range representing an integer, and 1/4 of the range (30 bits) representing a pointer. Given the constraint that pointer objects are aligned to 8 bytes, the 30-bits multiplied by 8 results in an 8GB addressable memory space. Pages within that space can be allocated using mmap with MAP_FIXED flag. Smaller memory usage results in more things in cache, resulting in higher performance.