From: Florian Frank <flori@...>
Date: 2007-06-12T23:16:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Benchmark segfault [Was: Array#inject to create a hash versus Hash[*array.collect{}.flatten] ]

Robert Klemme wrote:
> I believe it's the star operator:
> 
> 13:10:22 [Temp]: ruby -e 'Hash[*Array.new(ARGV.shift.to_i) ]' 1000000
> 13:10:35 [Temp]: ruby -e 'Hash[*Array.new(ARGV.shift.to_i) ]' 10000000
> -e:1: [BUG] Segmentation fault
> ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13) [i386-cygwin]
> 
> Aborted (core dumped)
> 13:10:39 [Temp]: ruby -e 'def f(*a) end; f(*Array.new(ARGV.shift.to_i))'
> 1000000
> 13:11:09 [Temp]: ruby -e 'def f(*a) end; f(*Array.new(ARGV.shift.to_i))'
> 10000000
> -e:1: [BUG] Segmentation fault
> ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13) [i386-cygwin]
> 
> Aborted (core dumped)
> 13:11:14 [Temp]: uname -a
> CYGWIN_NT-5.2-WOW64 PDBXPWSRK38 1.5.24(0.156/4/2) 2007-01-31 10:57 i686
> Cygwin
> 13:11:36 [Temp]: ruby --version
> ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13 patchlevel 0) [i386-cygwin]

The reason for this problem is, that the stack is used to pass A LOT of
arguments to the Hash.[] method. If the stack size of the executed process isn't
big enough (check your resource limits), this can lead to crashes.

-- 
Florian Frank