The future of 32-bit Linux

>The belief that time_t is somehow required to be linked to the size of the address space is false. That is, a 64-bit time_t and 32-bit pointers are perfectly compatible with each other.

I think everybody agrees on that. The link is more of a practical one: the size of a pointer and the size of the largest native integer type typically go hand in hand. 32-bit architectures have 32-bit registers, and both pointers and native arithmetic instructions are limited to 32 bits. This has led to C compilers defining the primitive integer data types as having a maximum size of 32 bits, which in turn is reflected in the ABIs. Furthermore, the time_t type is defined as an arithmetic type, i.e. it must support arithmetic using C's arithmetic operators.