Some of us are trying to convince the Node team that pointer compression should be on by default. If you need more than 4G per isolate you're probably doing something wrong that you shouldn't be doing in Node. With compression it's not actually 4GB, it's k * 4GB.
Java pointer compression promises up to 32GB of heap with 32 bit pointers, for instance.
If some subset of pointers has a guaranteed alignment of 2^N bytes, then the least significant N bits are always zero, and don't need to be stored explicitly (only restored when dereferencing the pointer)
Java pointer compression promises up to 32GB of heap with 32 bit pointers, for instance.