Re: wishlist: support for shorter pointers

[Martin Uecker <muecker@gwdg.de>]

Am Dienstag, dem 04.07.2023 um 16:46 +0200 schrieb Rafał Pietrak:...

> > 
> > I think a C++ class (or rather, class template) with inline functions is 
> > the way to go here.  gcc's optimiser will give good code, and the C++ 
> > class will let you get nice syntax to hide the messy details.
> 
> OK. Thenx for the advice, but going into c++ is a major thing for me and 
> (at least for  the time being) I'll stay with ordinary "big" pointers in 
> plain C instead.

Depending on what you are doing, "nice syntax" may not be
worth dealing with C++ issues. But this depends a lot on 
circumstances.  If the spaces saving are really valuable,
I would personally just wrap accesses with a macro.

> > There is no good way to do this in C.  Named address spaces would be a 
> > possibility, but require quite a bit of effort and change to the 
> > compiler to implement, and they don't give you anything that you would 
> > not get from a C++ class.
> 
> Yes. named address spaces would be great. And for code, too.
> 

While certainly some work, implementation effort for 
new kinds of named address spaces  does not seem to be
terrible at first glance:

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/target-macros/adding-support-for-named-address-spaces.html

> 
Martin