[bunderbunder]

It could have been all of those things, but the real reason was to keep Visual Studio fast.

Here's a rather opinionated blog post on the subject, from one of the people originally responsible for making the call: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2015/12/29/revisiting...

In a nutshell, his position was basically, "If you can't do what Visual Studio needs to do in 4GB (four gigabytes!) of RAM, you really need to think a little bit harder about your data management."

I personally didn't have a terribly strong opinion either way, up until about a year ago when I switched to Java and started using IntelliJ on a daily basis. Now I have come to agree quite vehemently with Mariani's opinion on the subject.

[slededit]

And yet on large programs unless you are very careful about which symbols get loaded VS will crash deterministically while debugging. This gets worse and worse over time as windows itself pulls in more modules for the same code with every update.

4GB simply isn't enough address space to keep every symbol in memory. I could manually manage them but that should be the computers job not mine.