[Python-Dev] Preventing recursion core dumps (original) (raw)

Vladimir Marangozov Vladimir.Marangozov@inrialpes.fr
Sat, 12 Aug 2000 16:21:50 +0200 (CEST)

Neil Schemenauer wrote:

On Fri, Aug 11, 2000 at 05:58:45PM +0200, Vladimir Marangozov wrote: > On a second thought, I think this would be a bad idea, even if > we manage to tweak the stack limits on most platforms. We would > loose determinism = loose control -- no good. A depth-first algorithm > may succeed on one machine, and fail on another. So what?

Well, the point is that people like deterministic behavior and tend to really dislike unpredictable systems, especially when the lack of determinism is due to platform heterogeneity.

We don't limit the amount of memory you can allocate on all machines just because your program may run out of memory on some machine.

We don't because we can't do it portably. But if we could, this would have been a very useful setting -- there has been demand for Python on embedded systems where memory size is a constraint. And note that after the malloc cleanup, we can do this with a specialized Python malloc (control how much memory is allocated from Python).

-- Vladimir MARANGOZOV | Vladimir.Marangozov@inrialpes.fr http://sirac.inrialpes.fr/~marangoz | tel:(+33-4)76615277 fax:76615252