matteocollina
@matteocollina
RAM is the new bottleneck. Every Node.js process is fighting for memory: containers, serverless, cloud bills, k8s limits. And here's the maddening part: V8 can use half the memory with one flag, and almost nobody turns it on.
So why is it still rare? Because until recently, enabling pointer compression meant building Node.js yourself from source with --experimental-enable-pointer-compression. There were no prebuilt binaries. Most people just... never tried it.
The other thing holding it back: compatibility. N-API addons (bcrypt, sharp, @napi-rs/*, argon2) work fine. But old V8 native addons, like anything using nan, can segfault under pointer compression. That's the tax you pay.
Look at the numbers.
Array of 1M objects: 40.47MB → 20.24MB. Nested objects (500K): 50.21MB → 24.64MB. Linked list: 19.08MB → 9.54MB.
Every pointer-heavy structure drops ~50%.
Pointer compression. V8 stores pointers as 32-bit offsets from a base address instead of full 64-bit pointers. That single change halves the size of every object in your heap.
if they don’t fine them we can abolish GDPR.