Memory limit to dict?

[Tim Peters]

[Olivier Langlois]
> ...
> I have kept thinking about the original problem and I now believe that
> the only solution if he wants to store 3.6GB of data in a Python script
> is to recompile Python in 64 bits. I do not know if this is something
> that someone has already done successfully...

I did the first port of Python to a 64-bit machine in 1993, and there
may well not exist any 64-bit machine today on which Python doesn't
run (for example, you can download a Python 2.4.3 Win64-Itanium
installer from the main 2.4.3 download page).

However, Python 2.4 still has lots of 32-bit limits internally.  A
massive effort is being made for Python 2.5 to relax those
limitations, as explained in PEP 353:

    http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0353/

Of course those still won't do you any good if the OS limits the
process user address space to 32 (or, far more likely, 31) bits.