[matheusmoreira]

> then changes one bit on every page in the entire virtual space

Yeah that sucks. Naively implemented garbage collectors have the same problem: they put the live and mark bits in the object itself which spreads those bits all over the address space. This leads to the garbage collector touching every single page when it scans and writes all of those bits.

The proper solution is to allocate separate bitmap pages. This dramatically improves cache efficiency. Machines always want a structure of arrays.

[evntdrvn]

I've always struggled a bit with the fact that "machines want SoA but readability/clarity/etc is easier with AoS". And wonder if it would be possible for a language to have the code representation be AoS but the implementation transparently be SoA.

[yvdriess]

Pretty old, but a good example of how such an abstraction works: https://github.com/ExaScience/arrow-street