Advantages
The major advantage of tagged pointers is that they take up less space than a pointer along with a separate tag field. This can be especially important when a pointer is a return value from a function. It can also be important in large tables of pointers.
A more subtle advantage is that by storing a tag in the same place as the pointer, it is often possible to guarantee the atomicity of an operation that updates both the pointer and its tag without external synchronization mechanisms. This can be an extremely large performance gain, especially in operating systems.
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