&gt; You&#x27;re assuming pointers dominate the footprint.<p>No, I just wrote:<p>&gt;&gt;  if you have only 8 GB of physical ram, you won&#x27;t necessarily be able to handle much more than with a 32-bit application<p>That means, I absolutely know applications that won&#x27;t be better on a 8 GB RAM computer as 64-bit applications, and they were written using standard C++ libraries. Typically, such applications weren&#x27;t optimized for cases when they use a lot of memory. If somebody competent spends enough time and energy, even such application can be made to use memory better but it&#x27;s not something that &quot;just happens.&quot;<p>And sometimes 32-bits application is a good trade-off. See for example<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;ricom&#x2F;2009&#x2F;06&#x2F;10&#x2F;visual-studio-why-is-there-no-64-bit-version-yet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blogs.msdn.microsoft.com&#x2F;ricom&#x2F;2009&#x2F;06&#x2F;10&#x2F;visual-stu...</a><p>&quot;A 64 bit address space for the process isn’t going to help you with page faults except in maybe indirect ways, and it will definitely hurt you in direct ways because your data is bigger.&quot;<p>What I&#x27;m trying to suggest is that the topic is more nuanced as &quot;64 doublegood 32.&quot;