"Don" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Walter Bright wrote:
I asked this over on stackoverflow.com to see what people using other
languages have to say, as well as the D community. The reason I ask is to
see if memory allocation can be allowed in functions marked "nothrow".
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/333736/is-out-of-memory-a-recoverable-error
I don't think it can be recoverable. Or rather, if it is recoverable, it
shouldn't have happened in the first place.
As far as I can tell, the only thing you could do to recover from an
out-of-memory condition is (1) to free some memory, or (2) to switch to an
algorithm which doesn't need as much memory.
Strategy (1):
Windows used to have a WM_COMPACTING message (maybe it still does) which
was sent when the system was running low on memory. In D, you could
imagine a similar sort of system callback, which is called when memory is
short -- it means, free some memory now, otherwise you'll get an out of
memory error.
This is much simpler and more powerful than catching an
OutOfMemoryException, freeing some memory, and then repeating what you
were doing.
There ought to be a means of giving the GC a function to call whenever it's
about to do its business.
Strategy (2):
If you've got a second algorithm to use, why weren't you checking
available memory, and choosing the correct algorithm in the first place?
<snip>
Because there's no documented function in Phobos for checking how much
memory is available, possibly?
Stewart.
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