On Mon, 6 Aug 2001, Simon Marlow wrote:

...

Issue 1: should the maximum heap size be unbounded by default? Currently the maximum heap size is bounded at 64M. Arguments for: this stops programs with a space leak eating all your swap space. Arguments against: it's annoying to have to raise the limit when you legitimately need more space.

Options: 1. remove the default limit altogether 2. raise the default limit 3. no change

(any others?)

I think that if there should be a default limit it would be nice to be able to set it at compile time. This is something that I've wanted for quite some time. If I know that the program I am compiling is likely to need 100M of heap space it feels silly having to give the RTS parameter to the program each time I run it. It would be much more convenient to just tell the compiler where I want the limit.

You can do this using the hooks that the RTS provides, although it's a bit inconvenient at the moment because as Sigbjorn points out we don't ship the RtsFlags.h file which contains the definition of the flags structure :-( Documentation is here: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/set/runtime-control.html#RTS-HOOK S You'll need to get RtsFlags.h from fptools/ghc/includes in a GHC source distribution. Cheers, Simon