Re: Portability of Lua

[Rena <hyperhacker@...>]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 9:51 PM, Tim Hill <drtimhill@gmail.com> wrote:

But the point is that the C "standard" leaves some things so open that it's very difficult to write code without making some guesses. Width of an integer? Behavior of C runtime functions? All have very subtle hidden assumptions. For example, when you call "malloc()" you assume that it won't take 5 seconds to allocate memory, but the standard is silent on such issues as API overhead. Writing in standard C is a REQUIREMENT for portability, but not a GUARANTEE.

Would such a guarantee even be possible? Even the fastest systems might take a while to allocate memory if there's none left, they're busy paging things out already, etc. An idea I've had in the past was that if an allocation ever fails, the process could be paused until enough memory is available instead of letting it die; in that case malloc() might block for any amount of time.

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