title: Can you allocate a very large single chunk of memory ( > 4GB ) in c or c++?
body: <p>With very large amounts of ram these days I was wondering, it is possible to allocate a single chunk of memory that is larger than 4GB? Or would I need to allocate a bunch of smaller chunks and handle switching between them?</p>
  
  <p>Why???
  I'm working on processing some openstreetmap xml data and these files are huge. I'm currently streaming them in since I can't load them all in one chunk but I just got curious about the upper limits on malloc or new. </p>