Re: Detecting endless recursion?

Torben Ęgidius Mogensen wrote:


>> my app just bombs because it runs out of memory (because my fake
>>stack keeps growing and growing). And the OS doesn't let me know it's
>>out of memory because it's happily paging out VM.
>
> It sounds like you are not implementing tail calls properly.


Since the tool is going to be educational, I assume that the users
will be able to halt the execution and inspect the stack state. In
this situation, tail call optimization is something that should not be
done: the users will complain that the tool has removed information
(all those intermediate stack frames that got eliminated due to tail
call optimization).


Of course, having tail call optimization would be a worthwhile option
to teach about that optimization itself, and to give the students the
possibility to run this kind of recursion without running out of stack
space :-)


I have implemented such an interpreter myself, though that
optimization never got beyond the discussion stage (we were happy to
get the entire system up and running within the allotted time, and
even more happy to see it in actual use *g*).


Regards,
Jo
--
Currently looking for a new job.

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