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| -rw-r--r-- | FAQ.md | 15 |
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@@ -285,3 +285,18 @@ attempts to introduce abstractions. And finally, it's still possible to add an abstract `size_t` in the future if the need arises and practicalities permit it. + +## Why have wasm32 and wasm64, instead of just using 8 bytes for storing pointers? + +A great number of applications that don't ever need as much as 4 GiB of memory. +Forcing all these applications to use 8 bytes for every pointer they store would +significantly increase the amount of memory they require, and decrease their +effective utilization of important hardware resources such as cache and memory +bandwidth. + +The motivations and performance effects here should be essentially the same as +those that motivated the development of the +[x32 ABI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X32_ABI) for Linux. + +Even Knuth found it worthwhile to give us his opinion on this issue at point, +[a flame about 64-bit pointers](http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/news08.html). |