Hacker News new | comments | show | ask | jobs | submit login jbeda 1983 days ago | parent | favorite | on: Smuggling Data in Pointers I implemented this in the core data structures for IE5. We were very memory constrained as we had to run on Win95 machines with something like 12MB of RAM. I was counting bits. The base level of the tree wasn't really a node DOM but rather a stream of document events (start element, text, end element, etc). We put these in a binary tree that was balanced as a splay tree. To drive memory usage down I reduced the {parent, left, right} pointers down to {child, next, left_child_bit, next_is_parent_bit}. 'child' pointed to the the first child. I knew if it was the left or the right child based on the left_child_bit. 'next' pointed either to the sibling or the parent, depending on the 'next_is_parent_bit'. However, to really realize the...