The special part is the "signal handler trick" that is easy to use for 32-bit pointers. You reserve 4GB of memory - all that 32 bits can address - and mark everything above used memory as trapping. Then you can just do normal reads and writes, and the CPU hardware checks out of bounds.
With 64-bit pointers, you can't really reserve all the possible space a pointer might refer to. So you end up doing manual bounds checks.
Can't bounds checks be avoided in the vast majority of cases?
See my reply to nagisa above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283102). It feels like by using trailing unmapped barrier/guard regions, one should be able to elide almost all bounds checks that occur in the program with a bit of compiler cleverness, and convert them into trap handlers instead.
Yeah, certainly compiler smarts can remove many bounds checks (in particular for small deltas, as you mention), hoist them, and so forth. Maybe even most of them in theory?
Still, there are common patterns like pointer-chasing in linked list traversal where you just keep getting an unknown i64 pointer, that you just need to bounds check...
With 64-bit pointers, you can't really reserve all the possible space a pointer might refer to. So you end up doing manual bounds checks.