Re: obscure failures when RAM is low

[Paul Eggert]

Daniel Pocock wrote:
> Can this be handled any better by autotools or is it a g++ problem
> exclusively?

No, it's a problem that in principle affects every program.  If you don't have 
enough memory, your programs won't run.

> Can the configure script check for sufficient RAM and disk space before
> the build?

I'm afraid the short answer is "no".  The only way, in general, to find out 
whether you have enough memory to run a program, is to run the program.  I 
suppose we could add a feature whereby a developer of a package could guess the 
amount of resources needed to build a package, but in practice such a feature 
would be so poorly maintained that I expect it'd be more trouble than it's 
worth.  Just get a big-enough machine -- this is software development, after all.