[10643] in Athena Bugs
lucid lisp dumps core with large environment
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Calvin Clark)
Fri Jul 2 23:57:05 1993
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 93 23:57:00 -0400
From: Calvin Clark <ckclark@MIT.EDU>
To: bug-lucid@Athena.MIT.EDU
Cc: bugs@Athena.MIT.EDU
I narrowed down the problem I was having. Lucid lisp doesn't like an
environment that's too large in total size. I wrote a perl script
which cleared the enviornment, set a single enviornment variable 4000
bytes in length and then invoked lisp. Lisp dumped core. I had it
step down to the point were it didn't dump core, and it stopped at
3979. It is not the single long environment variable that's the
problem; if you have lots of short environment variables, and the total
size of the environment is over 3.5k or so (according to estimates like
`printenv | wc -c'), it will also dump core.
I am capable of working around this problem, so it's not critical.
However, I would like this problem to be forwarded to Lucid. A language
such as lisp should not have such arbitrary limits! So far, it's the
only program that's died because of my enviroment, other than certain
old crufty versions of make.
-Calvin
For bug record:
Lucid version: 4.0
Platform: DECstation 5000/25
