[mercury-users] segfaults with message mentioning infinite recursion

[Fergus Henderson]

On 29-Mar-2003, Peter Moulder <pmoulder at csse.monash.edu.au> wrote:
> In a moment of frustration, I added the following to a paper:
> 
>  \item \tool\ is written principally in Mercury.
>  In the default compilation grade of Mercury, there is a fixed limit
>  on how big the stack and heap can grow.

That is not correct.  In the asm_fast.gc grade, which is normally the
default, there are fixed limits on how big the stacks can grow (and
for good performance these should be kept small, since currently the
conservative collector scans the whole of these stacks), but there is
no fixed limit on how big the heap can grow.

>  There are other compilation grades that do not have this limitation,
>  though they are not yet stable enough for our use (as at Mercury
>  0.11.0).

The hlc.gc grade has been "release quality" since about 0.10.1.
If there are any problems with it, please let us know.
In the hlc.gc grade, the stack and heap are only limited by the
operating system's limits (see e.g. the "ulimit" command in bash),
and the conservative collector only scans the live part of the stack,
not the whole stack.

> I'd like to check the accuracy of that before submitting.  E.g. I don't
> know whether the fixed heap size is relevant to these segfaults, and I
> haven't done too much experimentation with what crashes and what
> doesn't.

The heap size is fixed only for grades that target C or assembler and
do not use the conservative garbage collector.

> Is it correct that the --high-level grade and .net/java grades and asm
> grades don't have this limitation?

Yes.

> The "not stable enough" observation
> was with --high-level, though it's been a while since I've tried that;
> I can have another go and try to submit a bug report if people are
> interested.

Yes, please do so.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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