📝Value representation

This page discusses how Language runtimes represent values in memory.

Languages with static type system usually don’t do anything fancy. However, dynamically-typed languages require type checking in runtime and need elaborate value representation that carries additional type information but is not too expensive.

• Tagged pointer

• NaN-boxing

  • 64-bit machines don’t use full 64-bit address space

References

• julia/julia.h—comments describe how Julia stores values.

Backlinks

• 📝 Language runtime
• 📝 § Programming Language