[paulirwin]

I think I'm understanding correctly, but please correct me if I'm wrong... the class pointer is a pointer to the type (class) the object implements. So that would mean to exceed even an unsigned 32-bit pointer size, there would need to be more than 4 billion types in the program to exceed that, not objects. I can't imagine there are (m)any programs that hit that. And it definitely doesn't need to be a native 64-bit pointer. As pointed out in the proposal: "It may be possible to compress class pointers to less than 32 bits, at the expense of smaller addressable class space."

[maxfurman]

As other comments have mentioned, in the JVM every lambda creates a new type. So there are way, way more "types" created in Java than in a comparable program in another language.