A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
As per the Java Language Specification, section 10.4, all array access in Java is done by using an int as index. Since an int is a signed 32bit value, this limits the total number of addressable elements of an array to 2**31 (about 2 billion). It should be possible to address an array using 64bit values.

JUSTIFICATION :
While having access to 2 billion entries may seem sufficient, there are very compelling performance reasons to be able to use more in a single array. As an example, consider a square n*n matrix, stored as an array (either row or column major, doesn't matter which). Since an array stores at most 2**31 entries, this means that n=sqrt(2**31)=46341, thus the matrix cannot be very large. For multidimensional arrays this is an even more severe limitation (3d Tensors could at most be of size 1290).

A workaround is to use an array of arrays (ie. double[][]). However there is no guarantee that successive rows will be laid of linearly in memory, and therefore performance may be severly penalized. Experimentally, performance may suffer by a factor of over 2, often far greater.

Also, most existing matrix packages (ie. LAPACK) assumes linear storage, and are thus incompatible with a double[][] storage (requires double[]). Calling a LAPACK routine with a jagged storage thus requires extra array copying and memory allocation, and can further decrease performance and increase memory requirements.

EXPECTED VERSUS ACTUAL BEHAVIOR :
EXPECTED -
It should be possible to address arrays using 64bit integers (long?), as this provides a seamless transition for users of 64bit computers.
ACTUAL -
Cannot address more than 2**31 elements of an array.

CUSTOMER SUBMITTED WORKAROUND :
Use of array of array constructs (use double[][] instead of double[])
(Incident Review ID: 227911) 
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Posted Date : 2006-11-20 20:56:47.0

N/A

Fair enough.
Posted Date : 2006-11-20 20:56:47.0

It seems Microsoft .Net allows both int and long to access
arrays, and it even has an unsigned long, which means 2**64
elements can be used.

We use extensively arrays in MG4J, and presently the only obvious limit of our architecture is 2^31 documents. This may seem large, but Google already indexes four times that  number of pages, so it is actually quite small. Please, give us arrays with long indices.

This also limits the size of memory mapped files, and to work around you need to intercept every single array access.

and stop making interfaces with int indexed things, like CharSequence ... with charAt and length functions which are int based