[astrodust]

It's not about blindly increasing it, but using "long long" where normally "long" would be used, especially for values that have the possibility of wrapping.

The real impact on memory usage is likely the 8-byte pointers, but if you have a non-trivial amount of memory, it's rarely an issue worth fretting about.

If we cared about pointer sizes, we'd still be writing 16-bit code.

[mckilljoy]

At the time the original code was written, it wasn't possible for a 32-bit integer to overflow, which is presumably why they didn't use 64-bit. That possibility was only introduced in the patch, and no one caught the bug that came with it.

Running 64-bit would have "prevented" this bug simply by virtual of that fact that the default datatype would have been big enough to avoid overflow, but it isn't really a solution. I just find 32-bit vs. 64-bit to be inconsequential to the real mistake, which was an improper software development process.