Re: Stack Size?

[Mikael Djurfeldt]

address@hidden (Robert Uhl <address@hidden>) writes:

> Neil Jerram <address@hidden> writes:
> > 
> > > I've re-written the function, but it seems to me that it'd perhaps
> > > make more sense for Guile to simply grow the stack until it runs
> > > out of memory.  Is there a technical reason this doesn't happen?
> > 
> > No idea, I'm afraid.  Perhaps it's considered a good thing for a
> > language to allow applications to have a grip on their stack usage?

Guile is supposed to be "nice" towards novice users.  Infinite
recursions is a very common error.  Without a stack check, the effect
is that the machine freezes due to excessive swapping, preventing the
novice user from even examining what has happened.

> It seems to me somewhat broken that one must set a debug option
> explicitly off.  Sort of a command-line switch --behave-yourself, when
> that should be the default behaviour.  Certainly, stack size checks
> may be _very_ useful when testing code.  But just as certainly, in
> production those same checks are a nuisance, and can cause code to
> break.

It's probably a bad idea to use large stacks in production code and,
if not, it's rather easy to set the option to whatever one wants.

Maybe the correct setting is a very large stack?

M