------- Additional Comments From bangerth at dealii dot org 2004-11-24 16:49 ------- This has been discussed numerous times, and the main problem people had in coming up with better diagnostics is that the operating system does not communicate to a program why it is being killed. What happens is that the OS allows you to allocate lots of memory, but it doesn't actually provide it until you actually start writing to these pages for the first time. At that time, you write to an invalid page, a signal is raised, and the OS tries to come up with some physical memory to put behind that address. If it is out of memory, it can't do that and returns to the application without physical memory. The program then aborts with an invalid memory access, just as if you tried to dereference a null pointer. The program itself has no idea what happened, and the signal handler for the invalid memory access is invoked which then prints out the error message you have seen. What would probably have to happen for this to be fixed is to change the OS so that it gives an indication what is going wrong when it can't satisfy memory requests. That's a much bigger problem, though, than to just change a compiler message. After all, we don't want to lose the error message one gets when the compiler really tries to dereference a null pointer. W.
-- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=18639
