From: Bill Clagett <bill@32768.com>
Date: 2002-05-02T09:23:52+09:00
Subject: Re: some questions about rb_newobj()

I spend a lot of time in environments with no virtual memory or with
limited backing store. So I really appreciate it when people don't assume
that memory is infinite.

billl

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dennis Newbold" <dennisn@pe.net>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2002 4:53 PM
Subject: Re: some questions about rb_newobj()


> On Wed, 1 May 2002, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
>
> >
> > |Is it possible for this function to raise an exception?  (It's
desirable
> > |that it can't since that would mean that Data_Wrap_Struct can't raise
> > |either, which makes my job as an extension writer easier).
> >
> > Unfortunately it may raise an exception when there's no memory left.
> >
> > matz.
>      I'm a bit confused by the concept of "no memory left".  On Windows
> and all the variants of Unix that I'm aware of, the OS provides each
> process with a multi-gigabyte, (an don some systems, terabyte) virtual
> address space, supported by a swap file or swap partition.  If malloc()
> runs out or room on the heap it just calls brk() or sbrk() (I forget
> which) to get some more.  Under such circumstances, I find it difficult to
> imagine a real-world scenario which would result in an "out of memory"
> error condition.  Am I missing something here?  Or does Ruby have an
> artificial internal limit on the amount of memory it can work with?
> Perhaps due to the implementation of the garbage collector, or something?
> If there is such a limitation, can you tell me what it is?  Thanks.
>
> Dennis
>
>