Re: port initialization?

[Lynn Winebarger]

On Saturday 10 August 2002 08:33, Marius Vollmer wrote:
> Lynn Winebarger <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> >   If you're running out of memory, you might be in a deeply
> > recursed procedure that hasn't set any global variables,
> > so when it aborts, many megabytes become garbage.  It's
> > not that unusual.
> 
> Yes, but for throwing the error, we will also need some fresh storage,
> I think.  We could arrange things so that aborting will always work,
> but I'm afraid that would be quite tricky, and for little gain on a
> Unix-like OS.  Might be different for embedded systems.

    Will it take more than some small fixed amount?  It's not a sin to 
reserve a few words to deal with such situations.
     A related question is, what happens when you're low on memory
and send an interrupt signal?  Will the debugger (be able to) come
up?  Alternatively, to invoke the debugger when it bombs out by keeping
some memory in reserve (make a switch for it).  I suspect guaranteeing that
would require not only a decent call/cc implementation but a way to give the
garbage collector a new chunk of memory to handle (sort of call/cc on the 
gc).  Probably too much work, but it might help writers of such silly algorithms
see the error of their ways.

Lynn