Re: More on Lisp structures performance

"Tim Bradshaw (as tfb at cley dot com)" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.lisp.lispworks.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 24 Jan 2026, at 19:29, Yuri Davidovsky <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> But if you decide to use 4 bits for a tag, then it means you can’t retrieve a value from the heap easily because it won’t be a valid pointer anymore.

Yes, amazingly that is what SBCL does.   I mean you could just believe me, or you could, you know, check:

"Objects allocated on the Lisp heap are aligned to a double-word
boundary, leaving the low-order bits (which would normally identify a
particular octet within the first two words) available for use to hold
type information.  This turns out to be three bits on 32-bit systems
and four bits on 64-bit systems."

>From https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/doc/internals/objects-in-memory.texinfo

Gosh, who knew?

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