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I've been told this, and couldn't find a confirmation or rebuttal on the web. Is this true? If so, which is the limit? Is it usually enforced by compilers?

Thomas Dickey
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Emilio M Bumachar
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    I would expect this to be wildly architecture and OS dependent, and not at all something ANSI would care or concern itself with. – Joe Jul 26 '11 at 19:54
  • @Joe: so would I, but I would expect the same about, say the [number of extern variables](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6835718/does-ansi-c-place-a-limit-on-the-number-of-external-variables-in-a-program), or the position of the first different character in a different variable name. In both cases, ansi specifies lower bounds for what a compliant compiler must support (respectively, 4095 and either 31 or 32). Since ANSI cares about these two, it seemed plausible that it could also care about program size. – Emilio M Bumachar Jul 28 '11 at 13:17

2 Answers2

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ANSI C doesn't concern itself with that kind of thing.

There is nothing in §5 Environment in the C99 standard that even talks about "loading a program in memory".

The only considerations are what the environment must provide to be conforming with the abstract state machine that is the basis for the language/standard. That doesn't require "loading a program in memory" - code could be spooled from a deck of punch cards.

There are limits expressed on character sets, the source code size and complexity and a few other things - but those are mostly lower bounds that a conforming implementation must accept, and relate to the translation environment, not the execution environment.

Mat
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    Indeed, it doesn't even define what the "size of a program" might be. Objects have sizes. Other things, such as functions and storage used for overhead for certain operations, are likely to occupy some space *somewhere*, but the language itself provides no concept of what their size might be. – Keith Thompson Jul 27 '11 at 02:29
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If your executable is too large you may suffer thrashing, but aside from implementation-specific executable formats there isn't any maximum size.

0x5f3759df
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