[fpc-pascal] Error: Local variables size exceeds supported limit

[Yuriy Sydorov]

On 09.03.2019 14:33, Jonas Maebe wrote:
> On 09/03/2019 13:06, Fabio Luis Girardi wrote:
>> Thanks by your feedback. Do you think that should I fill a bug report?
> 
> That's up to you.
> 
>> I think that 2GB on 64 bits a very conservative limit.
> 
> 2GB stack space on is very large on any platform. Normally the heap is used for large allocations.
> 
> This probably mostly stems from 32 (and 16) bit platforms, where the issue was that it was hard to have large contiguous 
> address ranges in the virtual memory space. OTOH,
> * several systems still support limiting the stack size separately from the rest of the program's memory to more quickly 
> catch infinite recursion errors. Thread stacks are also often limited in size.
> * The offsets you can encode in a single instruction are always limited. E.g. on x86-64, offsets relative to the 
> stack/frame pointer are limited to 2GB. So if you allocate more stack space than that, accessing local variables that 
> are outside this addressable range will become slower because you'll need extra instructions (while local variables are 
> often accessed a lot)

FYI on 64-bit Windows the stack size limit is hard coded to 1GB. The same 1GB limit applies on 32-bit Windows. Probably 
Linux can be configured for larger stack.

But I agree with Jonas, that using huge local vars is pointless and inefficient.

So it is not the FPC issue, but the library design issue.

Yuriy.