[feature suggestion] Please allow to allocare memory dynamically

Bug #1983760 reported by Yuri
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
SBCL
Won't Fix
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

The current behavior is that there is a fixed heap size, and the program pre-allocates that much memory. It later fails with the "Heap exhausted" error when it actually needs more memory than that limit. '--dynamic-space-size {limit}' is a relevant argument that allows to change the memory limit.

Problem: the user needs to guess how much memory the program would need. This is (1) very inconvenient, (2) is different from how most programs allocate memory.

Suggestion: Add a way for the program to allocate more memory as it needs it and only fail when the memory is really exhausted. For example, make '--dynamic-space-size auto' can do it.

Ideally auto memory allocation should be a default.

Yuri (yuri-rawbw)
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Stas Boukarev (stassats) wrote :

Having a non-contiguous dynamic space will complicate a lot of things and slow down the GC. And reserving a large chunk of memory will not play well with any non-lisp code that coexists in the same process.

Changed in sbcl:
importance: Undecided → Critical
importance: Critical → Wishlist
status: New → Won't Fix
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