If one platform uses the upper 56 bits and another uses the lower 56 bits that doesn’t mean you have 0 bits available for tagging. It means you have 8 bits and have to go through a conversation when moving from one platform to another. This is perhaps annoying but perfectly fine.

Kinda weird to materialize pointers across architectures rather than indices.

But in any case surely the relevant consideration is “fewest number of free pointer bits on any single platform”. And not “intersection of free bits across all platforms”. Right?

Right.