C++ Intermediate Lessons: EP 1 : Memory

nice very cool Vouch 

dang my guy is helping a lot of ppl lol

I know what pointers are, but I've never understood why developers can just do:

/* using char instead of int because I don't need to take as much memory as an int does */
uint8_t x = 5;
int pointerToChar = &x;

instead of:

uint8_t *pointer = 5

Honestly I find the second option a little harder to understand (sometimes)

@lilbiden69

both your code snippets won't even compile, simply because you cannot initialize a pointer from an integer value and you cannot initialize a integer value from a address. the entire point of pointers ( no pun intended ) is to hold addresses to things that are stored in memory, and allowing access to them for either reading or writing to said memory address. 

Oh I thought addresses were 32-bit numbers and ints were also 32-bit numbers, so why would the compiler not allow an int variable to contain the address of another variable?

I believe it works with the GCC compiler

@lilbiden69

the size of addresses and variables depends on the architecture you're compiling on, not the compiler.

addresses in x86 are 32 bit numbers and int is a 32 bit data type.

Ints are 4 bytes of memory meaning they can store values up to 4 bytes( the data type int is always 4 bytes independent of the architecture ), that's why when dealing with addresses in x64 ( more specifically x86_x64 ) you utilize std::uintptr_t ( or std::size_t as they're the same and both change depending on the architecture ) as it will be 4 bytes on x86 and 8 bytes in x64 which is usually what you want..

and the thing is, what you're saying is true, but the code snippets you provided don't work because that's not how C++ works. 

/* using char instead of int because I don't need to take as much memory as an int does */
uint8_t x = 5;
int pointerToChar = &x;

If you try to compile this you get an error saying you cannot construct an int from a uint8_t / unsigned char*. 

uint8_t *pointer = 5

this also causes an error as you cannot construct an uint8_t* from an int. you should also know, in the second snippet, even if you did it "correctly" it still would not work as you're trying to create an uint8_t* from an int*.

	int y = 10;
	uint8_t* x = &y;

This would not compile, because it's trying to create a uint8_t* from a int*.