[Mingw-users] Out of memory for cc1plus

[Edward D. <eld...@tr...>]

I am seeing an out of memory message of:

"cc1plus.exe: out of memory allocating 65536 bytes"

when compiling code using mingw and gcc-4.8.1-4.

Strangely this error does not occur when compiling the exact same code
using versions from mingw of gcc-4.3.0 through gcc-4.7.2.

Also relevant, although possibly not helpful to this mailing list, is 
that the same code fails with mingw-64 and its versions of gcc-4.8.1, 
gcc-4.8.2, gcc-4.8.3, gcc-4.9.0, and gcc-4.9.1.

The code is heavily preprocessor code for my VMD library, which also
depends on the Boost PP library. In other words the code is almost
entirely involved with testing macro expansions in the library. As a
piece of related information, which may not be very relevant, the latest 
clang and versions of vc++ from vc++8 through vc++12 do not exhibit any 
out of memory errors.

It seems gcc has regressed in some way with version 4.8.1 in
its handling of memory allocation. Is this a known problem with with
this gcc release ? Is anyone involved with gcc trying to fix
the problem if it is known ? Or might this just be a problem in Windows
with the mingw implementation of gcc ?

The code in question is highly complicated, as befits an advanced macro
programming library like VMD, so it would be very difficult to reproduce 
it in some simpler form. But the fact that it occurs in the latest 
version of mingw gcc-4 but not in the earlier versions suggests 
something that has been done wrong and might already be known about.

I am compiling under Windows 7 Ultimate with 8 GB of real memory, so I
do not think this has anything to do with my hardware itself.