While it doesn't look like it's true anymore (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/hotspotfaq-138619.htm...), I sure seem to remember the Hotspot JVM having an option for 32 bit pointers for ... code, I think it was. Since few apps would need more than 4 GiB of code. And as you note, as the FAQ notes, this doesn't change much for most programming.