> The search tree is a binary trie over the bits of an IP address.

The interesting thing here is that the format is still the same.

I read the original spec and it did call out that

> In practice, data deduplication is handled by pointers, making this type unnecessary.

If any entry can be a pointer, you can shrink this recursively for each field type like a .strings table design.

These are widely deployed [citation needed] so nice chance to save some ram!

I wonder - if the number of nodes goes down enough then they could reduce the number of bits for the record_size and save another 12-25%

this article would probably be awesome if it wasn't AI written. It's terrible to read