On Aug 3, 2007, at 12:51 PM, Justin Morgan wrote: > > My question is, why can't Java allocate memory as needed? It seems > to put itself in a box which reduces the flexibility of a multi- > purpose language.
My guess is that this is part of the legacy of the sandboxing to make web-launched applications unable to gobble up your entire memory. It stops a certain class of denial of service attacks and can stop runaway or malicious programs from exhausting your available memory. That said, it would be nice if this really could grow more on demand, especially since some of the default installation parameters are laughably low for real applications. IIRC, on the Mac, the default maximum memory size is 32 or 64MB!
