I wish someone would design a CPU where pointers refer to individual bits instead of 8-bit bytes. Sure, most instructions may still enforce that pointers are multiples of 8, but that’s no different from how existing instructions may have alignment requirements. I fail to see how such a design would be any less efficient if executed properly.

I think it’s silly that we always need to jump through hoops to declare and interact with bitmaps. Why can’t I just write the following?

bool my_bitmap[1024];

In an ideal world C++ wouldn’t need template specialization to make vector<bool> efficient.

Sacrificing three extra bits in every pointer also wouldn’t really lead to exhaustion of the address space. Intel and ARM CPUs don’t offer a full 64-bit address space anyway.

starred & followed