The article clearly focuses size due to the use of libraries.
As for pointer size, personally I agree -- most processes can get by just fine with their own 32bit address space, so I'm not sure why we need to double the working-set size of all pointer-based data-structures.
> so I'm not sure why we need to double the working-set size of all pointer-based data-structures.
If your data structures can fit in a 32-bit address space, you can just place them in an arena w/ 32-bit indexes. You do need to use a custom allocator for every element of that data structure, but other than that it ought to be feasible. Link/pointer-based data structures should be used with caution anyway, due to their poor cache performance
As for pointer size, personally I agree -- most processes can get by just fine with their own 32bit address space, so I'm not sure why we need to double the working-set size of all pointer-based data-structures.