title: What's the purpose of compressed object pointers?
body: <p>Following my question on whether the <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6883239/could-the-64-bits-clr-use-compressed-pointers">CLR could use compressed pointers</a>, the answer was that it's pretty pointless. Still, some JVMs are implementing it, so what are the concrete benefits of this optimization, since gaining 4 bytes doesn't seem worth it?</p>