I wonder if there could be an alternative in hardware.
Could the cpu have a mode/flag where all pointers in cpu registers were treated as 32 bits (high 32 bits ignored)?
Alignment issues might make this impossible (loading a 32 bit address in a compatible way from memory/cache...) but it would be neat if it could work. For instance, if memory layout in 32 bit chunks were A... B..., there would have to be a way to load both A and B into the low 32 bits of a register.
Could the cpu have a mode/flag where all pointers in cpu registers were treated as 32 bits (high 32 bits ignored)?
Alignment issues might make this impossible (loading a 32 bit address in a compatible way from memory/cache...) but it would be neat if it could work. For instance, if memory layout in 32 bit chunks were A... B..., there would have to be a way to load both A and B into the low 32 bits of a register.