I think I'm understanding correctly, but please correct me if I'm wrong... the class pointer is a pointer to the type (class) the object implements. So that would mean to exceed even an unsigned 32-bit pointer size, there would need to be more than 4 billion types in the program to exceed that, not objects. I can't imagine there are (m)any programs that hit that. And it definitely doesn't need to be a native 64-bit pointer. As pointed out in the proposal: "It may be possible to compress class pointers to less than 32 bits, at the expense of smaller addressable class space."

As other comments have mentioned, in the JVM every lambda creates a new type. So there are way, way more "types" created in Java than in a comparable program in another language.