Re: [Caml-list] OCaml troll on Slashdot

[Oliver Bandel <oliver@first.in-berlin.de>]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2005 at 10:16:17AM +0000, Jon Harrop wrote:
> On Thursday 17 March 2005 03:48, Yaron Minsky wrote:
> > On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 19:35:17 -0800 (PST), brogoff
> > <brogoff@speakeasy.net> wrote:
> > > Anyways, long lists do occur, and Stack_overflow at the customer site
> > > sucketh bigtime.
> >
> > I completely agree.  As someone who makes extensive use of OCaml in a
> > business setting, the fact that the standard libraries throw
> > exceptions on large data structures is a real pain.
> 
> I believe the Stack_overflow exception is not necessarily thrown - the process 
> may simply die. IIRC, I found this on x86 Debian Linux when swap was turned 
> off.

Then it is the OS what kills your process, not OCaml.
If your process grows too much, the OS can/must
kill it, so that other processes has enough room to live.

If you have swap-space, the OS can use it.
If not, there is no other possibility than killing the
prcoess.

So, use swpa space, or buy some more memeory for your computer.

It's not hype to have swap-space because people often say
"I have enough memory in RAM - I don't need a awap."
But as you see this is a misleading assumption.

If swap-space would be of no use, I'm shure the Linux-/Debian
developers/maintainers had thrown it out of the kernel.

When the OS kills your process, then OCaml has no chance to
stop this...

Ciao,
   Oliver