[Python-Dev] Preventing recursion core dumps

[Vladimir Marangozov]

Neil Schemenauer wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Aug 11, 2000 at 05:58:45PM +0200, Vladimir Marangozov wrote:
> > On a second thought, I think this would be a bad idea, even if
> > we manage to tweak the stack limits on most platforms. We would
> > loose determinism = loose control -- no good. A depth-first algorithm
> > may succeed on one machine, and fail on another.
> 
> So what?

Well, the point is that people like deterministic behavior and tend to
really dislike unpredictable systems, especially when the lack of
determinism is due to platform heterogeneity.

> We don't limit the amount of memory you can allocate on all
> machines just because your program may run out of memory on some
> machine.

We don't because we can't do it portably. But if we could, this would
have been a very useful setting -- there has been demand for Python on
embedded systems where memory size is a constraint. And note that after
the malloc cleanup, we *can* do this with a specialized Python malloc
(control how much memory is allocated from Python).

-- 
       Vladimir MARANGOZOV          | Vladimir.Marangozov@inrialpes.fr
http://sirac.inrialpes.fr/~marangoz | tel:(+33-4)76615277 fax:76615252