Objective-C Tagged Pointers in Lion
Bavarious notes that Lion can represent some numbers—and, potentially, dates and managed objects(!)—as immediates, without allocating any memory. This is a really old trick, which I guess they couldn’t do until direct isa access had been phased out, but it’s certainly welcome for those of us who create lots of little objects.
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July 21, 2011 11:17 AM
Interesting evolution of the runtime, that has implications for the evolution of the language itself. It's time they drop the pointer part of objects.. Nobody dereferences those anymore, and now those pointers are not always pointers anyway :)
