On 7/13/2011 7:27 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > Code bloat... ah, yes, the joys of OOPs.... What does OOP have to do with this? Doubling the pointer size affects C, awk.... Consider Erlang, a functional language, not OOP in any way at all, not even in the sidecar way of, say, Perl. The most recent versions have a new build option that lets you build it as a 64-bit binary, except that it uses 64-bit pointers and ints only for a few "bulk data" type of things, such as ETS, its built-in memory-backed database system. For everything else, it uses 32-bit values. The resulting virtual machine emulator behaves like you'd built it as a 32-bit executable -- 4 GB limits and all -- except when you go to access ETS or one of the few other things it accesses through 64-bit pointers. Because the amount of data it is shuffling around is half the size it would be if you built it as a pure 64-bit application, it is measurably faster on some workloads. There's no free lunch. 64-bit is not an unqualified good.