Memory with 65536 pages on a 32-bit platform

[lum1n0us]

I'm not certain if this question has been answered or clarified before (I couldn't find one), so please inform me if there's been a similar discussion, and I will close this query.

The issue arises on a purely 32-bit platform (not a 32-bit mode on a 64-bit platform and without PAE), where the address space limitation is 4GB (probably less due to the 3GB user/1GB kernel split). Therefore, (memory 0 65536) will always fail to instantiate. I'm unsure if this is an exception allowed by the spec for 32-bit platforms.

[rossberg]

At least with Wasm 3.0, 64-bit platforms have analogous (and much more severe) problems with allocating large 64-bit memories. So this limitation isn't specific to 32 bit platforms. In general, allocating memory (and other) instances is always allowed to fail due to resource limitations.