US Patent 9569234 Dynamic bit-width modification of internal pointers of a virtual machine

A content processing device and corresponding method for processing source code are disclosed. The method may include receiving source code with a virtual machine operating on a hardware platform with an inherent address-pointer-bit-width and generating, from the source code, executable code that includes internal address pointers to objects in the virtual machine heap. One or more runtime conditions may be monitored and a size of a bit-width for the internal address pointers in the virtual machine may be adjusted, with or without associated changes to create optimized layout of the objects in the virtual machine heap, based upon one or more runtime conditions.