Malcolm Wallace wrote:
Just FYI, nhc98 has a single memory area in which the stack and heap grow towards each other. Memory exhaustion only happens when the stack and heap meet in the middle and GC fails to reclaim any space.
However, it can only do this because it is single-threaded. As soon as you need a separate stack for each thread in a multi-threaded system, this nice one-dimensional model breaks down.
Yes. A while ago I did the same thing with a toy FPL I was tinkering with. But like nhc98, it was single threaded. But I don't believe this is a serious extra complication. ghc does seem to have the capability to grow stacks effectively without bound (and presumably shrink them too), but it doesn't do this by default for reasons I don't understand. My preference would be to have an upper limit on total (stack+heap) memory used. Also, as Stefan has suggested, I think stack should grow linearly, not exponentially. But I don't really know enough about the innards of ghc rts to know what might or might not be possible/easy/difficult. Regards -- Adrian Hey