alt Hacker NewsThe Apple Watch has 32-bit memory addressing (and 64-bit integer arithmetic -- it's ILP32). Granted it doesn't run Linux, but it's a very very modern piece of hardware, in production, and very profitable.
Same for WASM -- 32-bit pointers, 64-bit integers.
Both of these platforms have a 32-bit address space -- both for physical addresses and virtual addresses.
Ripping out support for 32-bit pointers seems like a bad idea.
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int_19h • today at 1:51 AM
64-bit memories are already in wasm 3.0 draft (and in any case this isn't a platform where you'd need the Linux kernel running).
With watchOS 26, S9/10 watches will be going to normal ILP64 ARM64.
RAM limitations were one reason to use arm64_32, but a bigger reason is that the first watches were only ARMv7 (32-bit) so by sticking with 32-bit pointers, Apple was able to statically recompile all the 3rd party (ARMv7) apps from LLVM bitcode to arm64_32.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/16/watchos-26-moves-apple-...