Firefox Source Code Is So Big, It Hit the 32-Bit Virtual Address Space Limit

Just to make it clear: it's not Firefox itself that is hitting the virtual address space limit, but the linker when trying to link and optimize the source code.

To put things into perspective, last time I compiled Webkit (just the engine, not the whole browser) it ate ~1 GB of RAM, so it's not that surprising that the linker needs 3 GB for Firefox

I deleted a snarky reply about gcc -m32 and cross-compilation when I read the underlying bug [1] and saw that this was an issue only on Windows. I don't know a thing about Windows -- does MSVC not support cross-compilation?

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=709193

edit: Oh wow, this comment indicates that Microsoft doesn't provide a 64bit buildchain at all. Is that true? https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.platform/wLHTg_m...

The original thread without all the ads: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform...