
scienceFeb 13, 202510:32pending
Tiny Pointers, Big Savings: Rethinking Memory References
About this episode
What if pointers didn’t have to be log n bits? We explore tiny pointers, the deference table, and the load-factor trade-off that lets fixed-size or variable-size pointers shrink to astonishingly small sizes—and still retrieve data quickly. We’ll cover five practical applications (relaxed retrieval, succinct binary search trees, stable dictionaries, variable-size values, and optimal internal memory stash) and connect the idea to the balls-and-bins intuition.
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