Re: [Chicken-users] Segfault with large data-structures (bug)

[John Cowan]

Peter Bex scripsit:

> Speaking of which, I wondered about this before: why do we even _have_ a
> maximum heap size?  This is arbitrary and awkward.  For instance, on my
> trusty old G4 iBook, 2G was way more than I actually had (512 MB), while
> at work and on my new laptop it's a relatively small fraction of my total
> memory.

On a 32-bit system, you can't by any means get more than a 4G memory for
any single process, short of heroic measures in the kernel that allow
you to assign the same virtual addresses to different physical addresses
at the same time.  OS considerations limit this figure to 1G to 3G.

On x86_64 architecture, the hard limit is 128T (47 bits), but that's
well beyond the practical limit.

-- 
Real FORTRAN programmers can program FORTRAN    John Cowan
in any language.  --Ed Post                     address@hidden