Re: [Caml-list] stack overflow

[John Max Skaller <skaller@ozemail.com.au>]

Yang Shouxun wrote:

> Dear OCaml users,
> 
> I've written a modified version of C4.5 program in OCaml. However, when the 
> input is big, say over 50000, the program (native code on Debian) died for 
> stack overflow. Otherwise, it runs as expected.
> 
> Can anybody explain possible reasons causing stack overflow in OCaml?


Which version of Ocaml?

For Linux, there is no way a tiny dataset like 50,000 elements
could cause a stack overflow .. unless you're running an accounting
package which limits the stack/memory of a process you get ALL
of virtual memory for your stack.

Yet I had this problem, and it turned out to be
a code generation bug in Ocaml 3.03/4. That problem
has been fixed in 3.05.

The diagnostic I got, by the way, was not 'stack overflow'
but 'out of memory' when the stack really did overflow:
in my case non-tail recursive lexing was easy to make
blow the stack with a 7 Meg file: it took minutes to
dump, and the disk thrashed a lot .. the mouse froze ..
and i couldn't kill the process :(

If you are not getting these symptoms, it isn't a stack
overflow. [I am, of course, talking about the i86 native
code compiler]

-- 
John Max Skaller, mailto:skaller@ozemail.com.au
snail:10/1 Toxteth Rd, Glebe, NSW 2037, Australia.
voice:61-2-9660-0850


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