Can you allocate a very large single chunk of memory ( > 4GB ) in c or c++?

Question

With very large amounts of ram these days I was wondering, it is possible to allocate a single chunk of memory that is larger than 4GB? Or would I need to allocate a bunch o

Answer 1

The advantage of memory mapped files is that you can open a file much bigger than 4Gb (almost infinite on NTFS!) and have multiple <4Gb memory windows into it.
It's much more efficent than opening a file and reading it into memory,on most operating systems it uses the built-in paging support.