Advantages and disadvantages of the LP64 environment

A major advantage of using a 64-bit environment is the increase in the virtual addressing space. A 64-bit program can handle large tables as arrays without putting temporary files in secondary storage. LP64 provides:

• 64-bit addressing with 8-byte pointers
• Large object support (8-byte longs)
• Backward compatibility (4-byte integers)
  Note: Integers are the same size under the ILP32 and LP64 data models.