I don't think are current memory architecture is fundamental incompatible with a paging based vector. Doubling the size of pointers is expensive. However, given

I don't think are current memory architecture is fundamental incompatible with a paging based vector. Doubling the size of pointers is expensive. However, given current RAM sizes, our existing 48-bit effective pointer size is already large enough. It isn't enough to give every allocation a massive amount of virtual address space to grow into. But it should be more than enough to seperate out actual memory allocation from virtual address space allocation. This would mean a more complicated malloc, where you ask for both an actual memory allocation, and an amount of address space to be allocated. And will still require you to have some sense of the maximum size you might need in a given vector. Also, it forces memory allocations to be multiples of the page size, which isn't always ideal.