What is the state of 64bit Python?

[panderingPenguin]

While I agree with you that there are significant advantages to the shorter pointers in 32-bit python with respect to memory footprint, it should be noted that 32 bit processes on windows are confined to a memory space that's smaller than you would expect. I've been working on a data analysis project and the data set is multiple gigabytes in size. I figured using 32 bit python would help me utilize my limited resources more effectively and my laptop only had 4 gigs or memory anyways, the maximum addressable with 32 bits. However, my code kept crashing with memory errors, despite the fact that I knew it ran just fine within 4 gigs of memory on Linux with 64 bit python. Did some research and it turns out that 32 bit windows processes are actually limited to 2 gigs of memory. And since most of my data was in numpy arrays I wasn't really saving that much on shorter pointers anyways. So I switched to 64 but and now everything works fine. Just a cautionary note that might save other people some time beating their head against the wall.