Question

Could be that I am overlooking something obvious, but where is pointer metadata stored? For instance if I have a 32-bit int pointer ptr and I execute ptr++ it knows to advance 4 bytes in memory. However, if I have a 64-bit int pointer it knows to advance 8 bytes. So who keeps track of what type of pointer ptr is and where is it stored? For simplicity you can limit this to C++.

Answer 1

It isn’t stored anywhere, per-se. The compiler looks at the type of the ptr and turns the ++ operation into an increment of the correct number of bytes.