Seems like I keep poking at this idea again every couple years.
If we use a <base,vector> we can cover a much wider range without losing any precision. For a 32 bit machine, 32 bits per word would cover 5 bits worth of entry IDs. So 27 bits would comprise the base, and the next 32 bits would represent up to 32 entry IDs.
To avoid wasting those 5 unneeded bits in the base, we could use them as a run-length counter and use multiple vectors per base. But it might be better to slide things over and use just a 24 bit base, and use the bottom 8 bits of the word as a bitmask to represent which following vectors are present. E.g.
......01 means 1 vector follows, representing base+ 0-31. ......02 means 1 vector follows, representing base+32-63. ......05 means 2 vectors follow, base+0-31 then base+64-95.
That allows us to represent up to 256 entryIDs in only 288 bits (instead of the 16384 bits we currently need). That would allow us to track about 1.86M entryIDs in the same space we currently use to track only 64K entryIDs.
It seems we would still need some kind of range representation to handle IDLs with more than 1.86M entries.