Hey all!
I just wondered, what if your RAM is almost full and you do not have a pagefile like on windows, and your program declares some variables without the use of allocation functions that exceed the maximum memory? With allocation functions I have some error checking but how do I detect that the system doesn't have enough free memory for my normal declaration needs? What will happen to a C program in that case?
Thanks in advance,
Hawk
Well if there is insufficient memory to even load the program, the OS will return to the caller of CreateProcess() an error state of insufficient memory.
If the program runs, but some function declares a lot of local variables, and that blows all the stack allocation, then the OS will kill the program with a similar kind of error message.
If you dance barefoot on the broken glass of undefined behaviour, you've got to expect the occasional cut.
If at first you don't succeed, try writing your phone number on the exam paper.
More technically, the stack is allocated once the process starts and is fixed in size - it will neither grow nor shrink, so either it runs or it doesn't.
Same goes for creating threads - if there isn't enough memory (because it has to allocate a stack), it fails.
Dynamic memory will fail if there isn't sufficient memory.
You cannot detect problems if the stack cannot be allocated (unless you are attempting to create a new thread).
Originally Posted by Adak
I see! Then there is no need to worry about that, thank you for the explanation!
Hawk
