Should pointers be 64-bit?

[jwollen]

With the current 32-bit pointer width, raw physical pointers are unconvenient at best and open up a bunch of pitfalls at worst.

Technically, pointers should be 64-bit, at least when any physical addressing model is enabled.
This is problematic because of the preferred integer width of 32-bit in shaders, while Rust assumes usize in most APIs.

Is there any way we could switch to a 64-bit target without compromising performance?
For example

• Add optimization passes to convert usize -> u32 for logical ops
• Add a custom SPIR-V type for usize that somehow gets inferred late
• Customize core to add u32 indexing

On the other hand, physical pointers in shaders are somewhat niche, especially with more progress towards better bindless extension.

[LegNeato]

Another potential is you could do something like scoped threads, where the scope has 64bit pointer access.