@istvan @redstarfish @bonifartius Support for more than 4GiB of memory on a system that runs many programs is necessary - after all a computer with the power to run 40,000 programs at the same time cannot do so if there is a 4GiB memory limit.

Although that can be achieved even on a 32 bit processor with nasty hacks, such kind of cruft is best avoided.

The x86 instruction set and the way arguments are passed is horrible - the AMD64 instruction set solves many of the issues and is quite pleasant in comparison.

The X32 ABI may be of interest to you, as that is mostly 64bit, except with 32bit pointers - meaning the AMD64 semantics can be used, but programs are limited to 4GiB of memory (but you can also run specialized software that needs more memory than that with 64 bit pointers too).