Most installed versions of GNU Emacs will use 24-bit signed integers (and 24-bit pointers) internally. This limits the file size that Emacs can handle to 8,388,607 bytes (2^23 - 1).
Leonard N. Zubkoff <lnz@lucid.com> suggests putting the following two lines in src/config.h before compiling Emacs to allow for 26-bit integers and pointers (and thus filesizes of up to 33,554,431 bytes):
#define VALBITS 26 #define GCTYPEBITS 5
WARNING: This method may result in `ILLEGAL DATATYPE' and other random errors on some machines.
David Gillespie <daveg@csvax.cs.caltech.edu> gives an explanation of why Emacs uses 24 bit integers and pointers:
Emacs is largely written in a dialect of Lisp; Lisp is a freely-typed language in the sense that you can put any value of any type into any variable, or return it from a function, and so on. So each value must carry a "tag" along with it identifying what kind of thing it is, eg., integer, pointer to a list, pointer to an editing buffer, and so on. Emacs uses standard 32-bit integers for data objects, taking the top 8 bits for the tag and the bottom 24 bits for the value. So integers (and pointers) are somewhat restricted compared to true C integers and pointers.
Emacs uses 8-bit tags because that's a little faster on byte-oriented machines, but there are only really enough tags to require 6 bits.