From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2002-05-02T13:14:09+09:00
Subject: Re: some questions about rb_newobj()

Hi,

In message "Re: some questions about rb_newobj()"
    on 02/05/02, Dennis Newbold <dennisn@pe.net> writes:

|> Unfortunately it may raise an exception when there's no memory left.

|     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.

Ruby does not introduced any artificial memory limit, but still memory
is finite resource.  You can almost forget it these days, but I (as an
implementor) cannot ignore.

							matz.