stack space in gcd operations

[Peter Cordes]

On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 03:36:20PM -0400, David Harvey wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am having a problem with a threaded application using mpz_invert and 
> running out of stack space on OS X. The default stack size for new 
> threads on OSX is apparently only 512 KB, compared with 8 MB for linux 
> (at least on the systems I tried).

 Does anyone know why stack space is unpopular?  In C, I sometimes use
C99 variable-length arrays on the stack for working space instead of
malloc/free.  In C++, I'd use something with a destructor to free any
memory I allocated, but C doesn't have destructors.  It doesn't have
exceptions either, but it's ugly using  goto out_free  instead of
return false  on errors.

 Hmm, I guess if you touch a lot of stack memory, it's never really
free()d back to the OS, so the OS has to actually page it to disk if
there is memory pressure.

-- 
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ;  e-mail: X(peter at cor , des.ca)

"The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!
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