Comment Re:Nice concept (Score 2, Informative) 262
The main benefit is that it runs faster. 64-bit pointers take up twice the space in caches, and especially L1 cache is very space-limited. Loading and storing them also takes twice the bandwidth to main memory.
So for code with lots of complex data types (as opposed to big arrays of floating point data), that still has to run fast, it makes sense. I imagine the Linux kernel developers No1 benchmark of compiling the kernel would run noticably faster with gcc in x32.
The downside is that you need a proper fully functional multi-arch system like is slowly getting adopted by Debian in order to handle multiple ABIs. And then you get into iffy things on if you want the faster