#8189: Default to infinite stack size? -------------------------------+------------------------------------------- Reporter: nh2 | Owner: Type: bug | Status: new Priority: high | Milestone: 7.8.1 Component: Runtime | Version: 7.6.3 System | Keywords: Resolution: | Architecture: Unknown/Multiple Operating System: | Difficulty: Easy (less than 1 hour) Unknown/Multiple | Blocked By: Type of failure: Runtime | Related Tickets: crash | Test Case: | Blocking: | -------------------------------+------------------------------------------- Comment (by simonmar): We can't tell whether the heap is full by looking at `total_allocated`, because the GC needs to run first (`total_allocated` basically tells you how much memory was allocated since the last GC). I can't think of a good way to determine whether we ran out of heap because a lot of stack was allocated - it's guesswork. Should there be a default maximum heap size? I'm hesitant to do this because enabling the maximum heap size also enables the automagic machinery that switches on the compacting collector when we get near the maximum heap size, and the compacting collector is much less well battle- tested than the standard copying GC, not to mention much slower. On the other hand having a maximum heap size with the copying GC doesn't work terribly well, because the copying GC wastes so much memory. We could just set the default maximum stack size to be some sensible fraction of real memory? -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8189#comment:18 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler