Tcl Source Code

Example (by Ashok):

% proc xx [lrepeat 0x100000000 x] {}
killed

Or explicitly defining the proc in script

% set l [lrepeat 0x100000000 x]; llength $l
4294967296
% writeFile manyargs.tcl [list proc xx $l {return $x}]
% exit
[apn@tcltk build]$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd` ./tclsh manyargs.tcl 
killed

Note that this has no relation to TIP #626: Those examples don't have more than 2**31 command lines arguments, the "proc" command just has it's second command-line argument being a list with 2**31 arguments. Since Tcl 9.0 already allows large list sizes, Tcl 9.0 should already be able to handle this.

Since a proc with that many variable is unrealistic, setting this ticket as "minor"

Fixed [3af3ca8d988e9a1f|here]

After better fix:

$ ./tclsh
% proc xx [lrepeat 0x100000000 x] {}
total mallocs              163959265
total frees                   130503
current packets allocated  163828762
current bytes allocated   41896099036
maximum packets allocated  163828762
maximum bytes allocated   41896099036
procedure "xx": memory error
%

Actually, it depends where the allocation error occurs. It might happen in a Tcl_Alloc(), it also might happen in Tcl_CreateHashEntry().

In the first case, we might use Tcl_AttemptAlloc() and do a proper cleanup. In the other case, we would need a Tcl_AttemptCreateHashEntry() (TIP!)

After 'fix':

$ ./tclsh
% proc xx [lrepeat 0x100000000 x] {}
total mallocs              202168073
total frees                   130242
current packets allocated  202037831
current bytes allocated   43653712110
maximum packets allocated  202037831
maximum bytes allocated   43653712110
procedure "xx": arg list contains too many (4294967296) entries
%
%
% exit