Could you borrow a bit?
Rust Internals [Unofficial]
May 18, 2026
And I'm not sure that &u1 references would have to be fat either, since no platform (I think?) uses the full address space. Of course CPU vendors are free to start using the top three bits whenever they please, but if a popular programming language started using those bits for sub-byte addressing perhaps the vendors could be persuaded to leave them reserved.
Discussion in the ATmosphere