Hi all,

It looks like Sun's indifference to 64-bit array indices for Java has been
public for a number of years:
<http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4880587>

I've just added my vote to the RFE.

In April I commented:

  The remaining critical omission from the JVM is a new set of arrays
  with 64-bit (long) array indices. This will not affect existing code as
  long array indices are currently a compile time error. While easy to
  implement and critical for some scientific computing tasks I do not see
  Sun taking leadership of this issue. My guess is (an offshoot of) the
  Harmony project will eventually force Sun to address this.

In 2003 Intel was ridiculed for its claims that it may not be necessary to
provide 64-bit CPUs to desktop consumers before the end of the decade:
<http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=54835&cid=5371889>

Not being able to make nor index a 2GB byte array is similarly ludicrous.
Emulation of contiguous memory using arrays of arrays is a low performance
workaround. Java is supposed to be a high performance general purpose
programming environment for today's hardware. In what decade is Sun going
to recognise this?

Regards,
Adam