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Spelling it out like that sure gives some perspective - It's a frighteningly low number! They sell 2tb microsd cards nowadays. I bet you could fit 2^64 bytes in a shoebox. So I think uint64 might eventually be insufficient as a size type.

Edit: Well not quite, more like a small closet.



Almost makes you think RISC-V was right with 128-bit extension. On the other hand, exabyte-scale memories might one day be possible, but would it still be useful to maintain single-address-space illusion for these?


RV128I is not an extension, but a (non-ratified) base ISA.

Independent from RV64I, which in turn is independent from (and predates) RV32I.


>Spelling it out like that sure gives some perspective - It's a frighteningly low number!

Yeah, it's very common for computers to have byte addressable 4 exabytes of storage...


Well I used to think 64 bits would be enough forever basically, I guess that's why I was a little shocked that it actually might become insufficient at some point even if its far off.


I'd say it's more likely that in the future we'll regress to 8-bit machines, losing the ability to sustain fab technology, than we'll exhaust 64 bits address space.

Having said that, with the advances of Electron apps, you might very well have a point...


I do not look forward to the future where common software requires exabytes of memory.




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