>This is perhaps a naive question, but are there many machines that need more than 64bits of address space? I thought a potential CPU of the future could have

>This is perhaps a naive question, but are there many machines that need more than 64bits of address space? I thought a potential CPU of the future could have 128 bit "word size" for integer calculations and as a side effect also 128 bit pointers to reuse registers/instructions for both of them (just like today with 64 bit CPUs, indeed you don't need to map the entire address space but pointers are still 64 bit because it's the CPU's word size). And then address space layout randomization in a future OS could choose to map very high address ranges for the process, which can't be represented with Java's long.