I think I may already know the answer for this question, but just to make sure...
I was reading up at this page:
C++ Optimizations You Can Do "As You Go"
and it has intrigued me that passing an int (or even a bool) as an argument would be slower than by reference/pointer. So here's my questions:
On 32 bit machines, pointers are 32bits, and 64 for 64bit machines, right?
And 32 bit CPUs can only process 32bits at a time (for each core), hence anything from 8 bits to 32 bits would take the same speed, right?
If yes to both, then would that mean a double (64 bits) on a 64 bit machine would take the same length of time to process as an int (32 bits) on a 32 bit machine?
What if I had 4 different 8 bit variables on a 32 bit machine? Would the CPU compress it and process it as it would with a 32bit int?
Sorry for the overload, but this has sparked my interest.
Cheers.