Of course, the 2GB limit on 32bit Windows programs also seems terribly broken to me.
It seems Windows bashing without any background knowledge is becoming popular again -_-
i'd love to hear more about this awesome 32-bit operating system you seem to know about that defies the laws of math.
It argues that while you can get 2Gb (or 3Gb, ...) you cannot get a contiguous space larger than X megabytes.
That said, it is a rather odd limitation of the garbage collector as well. Most GCs works around the problem by being able to allocate memory in chunks that are different. Still - this solution, one large chunk, is by far the simplest and fastest solution to the problem.
I think that a combination of allocating more to userland, killing all the default services and trimming the server, along with telling the memory manager to treat go as a background process would solve this.