Re: 64 MB memory Limit? and question

[Elmar Haneke]

Erick Alphonse wrote:

But Daniel said he was working on a new memory management framework,
with garbage collection. Maybe that will lift the current restriction?

The garbare collection can reduce the need for huge stacks 
significantly since wasted space is recycled. On Systems with GC (e.g. 
if I run my program in SWI-Prolog) the same code does usually require 
much less space.

By the way an auto-expandable stack would be very nice [;)] . Is it so
inefficient?

The Stacks are allocated as contingous memory blocks. If this is kept 
valid reallocating stacks might result in an great memory 
fragmentation: To enlagge an 30M stack to 40M you have to alloc 
additional 40M if the memory next to the the 30M segment is not available.

Dynamic stack growing done by many OS is not faced with this problem: 
In the linear 4G addressspace they are growing the stack downwards and 
the heap upwards. Until Stack and heap will meet there is always free 
adresspace to alloc additional space for stack.

To transform this mechanism to the different prolog memory areas you 
will have to use OS-specific tricks or it is impossible at all.

Elmar