It definitely requires a ton of virtual memory, and yes, you can't do 32-bit word sorting on 32-bit machines. There's actually a use case involving 24-bit word

It definitely requires a ton of virtual memory, and yes, you can't do 32-bit word sorting on 32-bit machines. There's actually a use case involving 24-bit words where the number of occurrences of each word doesn't matter, and where they necessarily start to cluster after each iteration. So there is a use case (I might add it's tailor-made for this use-case). But you can still e.g. sort database keys which might only have a 26-bit maximum, and it'll take advantage of any clustering that exists in the data, like if in a log you get some customers appearing more often than others, or more frequently in streaks. It also works great when your data is in ranges and you don't want to manually account for this: this will skip that entire empty range in logarithmic time. (Example, all your keys are between 1000-1100 and 5000-6000. The empty range 1100-4999 will be traversed in like 12 steps.)