can my programs access more than 4GB of memory?

Question

if I run python on a 64bit machine with a 64bit operating system, will my programs be able to access the full range of memory? I.e. Could I build a list with 10billion entries, assuming I had enough RAM? If not, are there other programming languages that would allow this?

Answer 1

You'll need to be sure that Python has been built as a 64 bit application. For example, on Win64 you'll be able to run the 32bit build of Python.exe but it won't get the benefits of the 64 bit environment as Windows will run it in a 32bit sandbox.