Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

For counts of things you have in memory, 32 bits is usually enough -- even if each thing is just 8 bytes, 2^32 of those objects would require 32 GB.


32GB isn't an exceptional amount of memory these days.


Sure -- but it is an exceptional amount of memory to use for tiny objects like those. If you're working with four billion objects at a time, they're probably more substantial than eight bytes.


Or you spent a lot of effort to get them to 8 bytes or even smaller, to fit as many of them as possible in memory. See use-cases like time-series/analytics databases, point-clouds, simulations with many elements...


You mean 4GB.

And yes, 32-bit programs can't use more then 4GB.


No, I mean 32 GB -- 2^32 x 8 bytes. We're discussing 32-bit integers, not pointers.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: