Suggestion

[Emjayen]

You may want to consider leveraging __ptr32. Unfortunately it's not practical to be used in real-world software (it's real utility I would guess is internally at MS for easing thunking under WoW64/related interop. problems).

[tringi]

I'll look into it. The documentation is somewhat confusing though, not sure if it actually does what I need. But still, unless there's a trivial way to somehow make std containers (and whole language basically) to use the short pointers, it will remain just an exercise and proof of concept.