Before a program can be run, it needs to be built. It’s a well-known fact
that modern software, in general, consumes more runtime resources than
before, sometimes to the point of
forcing users to upgrade their computers. But it also consumes more resources
at build time, forcing operators of the distributions’ build farms to invest
in new hardware, with faster CPUs and more memory. For
32-bit architectures, however, there exists a fundamental limit on the amount
of virtual memory, which is never going to disappear. That is leading to
some problems for distributions trying to build packages for those architectures.

Source: LWN.net – [$] Linker limitations on 32-bit architectures