
2^64 bytes is enough for any human - s3arch
https://lwn.net/Articles/80696/
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M_Bakhtiari
What an idiotic argument. Has he never heard of virtual memory? You might want
to memory map things that aren't necessarily on a die inside your computer, in
fact that's already a very common pattern, with mmap(2) and similar system
calls.

And the idea can be extended to large computer clusters if not the entire
planet, in which case you might be looking at 128 or 256 or a non-power-of-two
figure, IPv6 addresses already taking up 128 bits. In which case it would
probably also be a good idea to think about variable length pointers to
decrease the overhead and address Donald Knuth's complaints in his "Flame
About 64 bit Pointers" [1]

1\.
[https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html](https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/news08.html)

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brudgers
date, 2004

