[ale] gcc memory leak?

[Eric Z. Ayers]

You can report it, but you'd better have a pretty concise test case if 
you want anyone to do something about it.  In my experience, the
2.95.2 release is "virtually unmaintained".  You can find patches to
it floating around here and there.  Our compaq Tru64 compiler wouldn't 
work without a few patches, but I don't know where they came from! 
We noticed that memory consumption on the 2.95.2 release isn
higher. We had one large source file that did the same thing - made
the machine keel over because of a very large function it was trying
to compile.  We ended up just adding more swap and RAM. We had to use
gcc 2.95 because 2.7.2 created a buggy object file...

-Eric.

Wandered Inn writes:
 > Had a scary problem with a compile yesterday, and based on what
 > happened, I'd expect that there might be some kind of memory leak in
 > gcc.  I'm looking for some insights.  I'm running 2.95.2.  I was
 > compiling the latest version of sane, the scanner package.  When it got
 > to the point that it was compiling the final backend, umax scanner
 > stuff, I could see my memory usage quickly go up.  Once all the memory
 > was gone, then the swap usage began to climb.  The first time this
 > happened, I wasn't aware what caused it as I was running a number of
 > packages. I was too late to do anything about it and it locked my box
 > up.  After a hard reboot, I fired off the compile again and
 > intentionally kept an eye on the memory usage.  The problem is very
 > consistent.  I can kill the compile and the memory usage drops
 > dramatically.
 > 
 > My point is, a compiler shouldn't do this.  I would not expect when
 > attempting to compile a piece of code, that gcc could cause this kind of
 > problem.
 > 
 > Anyone else seen anything like this?  Comments?
 > 
 > Should I report this as a bug in gcc?
 > 
 > --
 > Until later: Geoffrey		esoteric at denali.atlnet.com
 > 
 > "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds.
 > The
 > latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to
 > hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his
 > intelligence."
 > - Albert Einstein
 > --
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