Re: [Chicken-users] Unbounded stack growth

[Alex Shinn]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 4:51 PM, Alex Queiroz <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 9:47 AM, Alex Shinn <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> Wow, if you've got a magical Scheme compiler that
>> can read my mind and fix all my bugs for me I'll switch
>> right now! :)
>>
>
>      Are you really saying that it is ok for a Scheme program to crash
> with a segmentation fault because of programming errors, and not just
> because of compiler bugs?

No, and I never said nor implied that.

I think the continuum here is, all else being equal:

  raise continuable exception > abort with meaningful message > segfault

though often all else is not equal.

For the specific case of handling programs which
use unbounded stack, most implementations just
blow up, and the question is how heap do they
allocate in the process.  Are they optimistic and
think "it can't be much longer now" as they allocate
that last 100MB, or do they bail out a little earlier?
Whether you set a fixed limit or just let it use up
all available memory, there is still a limit.  Setting
a separate limit does leave you with some heap
space to try to recover with, though, and is friendlier
to other processes.

But "now we're just negotiating the price."

-- 
Alex