Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] [CHICKEN 5] Change numerics representations

[John Cowan]

On Tue, Oct 4, 2016 at 4:00 AM, <address@hidden> wrote:

> We could still get rid of the tagged pointer type.  After some more

 

> thought on the matter, I believe they're mostly worthless.

"They" means tagged pointers? I agree.

I continue to disagree.  Tagged pointers make it possible to have dynamically type-safe or type-dispatched treatment of C objects referred to by the pointer side.  Logically it is equivalent to encapsulate the raw pointer in a record, but record dereference is much slower than pointer dereference for whatever reason, so it adds substantial overhead.

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