Why Programming Environments deliberately set a Limit to Recursion-Depth

One of the facts about Computing which new programmers need to know, is that although the concept sounds intriguing, that their code could be based on ‘Infinite Recursion’, if this is in fact attempted, by code which is missing a necessary end-condition, that caps further recursion, executing the code will in principle, consume an amount of memory that fills the entire available memory within a few seconds, possibly without the programmer even noticing so. And will fail to produce a result.

Then, unless something external intervenes, an OOM condition will take place, that can crash the session. In that case, only the peers will be laughing, while the actual programmer might find the whole result rather frustrating.

This is why running images always have a maximum stack-depth set, and even LISP needs to have a limit set, because code would be easy to write, that tries to be infinite.

The special case needs to be tested for, that provides a direct result, before the attempt is instructed, to attempt recursion in general.

If a programmer needs very deep recursion, he can set this limit to some ridiculously-high value, but it needs to remain finite, so that in the event of an innocent coding error, control is returned to the programmer within seconds.

Likewise, I have heard from a fellow programmer, that he was once writing innocent code, that included hard-drive I/O. And due to a simple error, his program filled up much of his hard-drive with useless data, within seconds, before he could realize what was happening, and stop his program.



Caveat in using Visual Studio Express 2015









I have been test-driving Visual Studio Express 2015.

One of the projects which I attempted today on the Windows 7 desktop computer I name ‘Mithral’, was to compile OGRE 1.10 . This is an unstable build of OGRE, and it would be helpful for me to know whether this instability comes more, from the software, or from the weaker graphics card on my Linux laptop ‘Klystron’, which I have already had to switch to OGRE 1.9 .

My initial attempt to compile OGRE 1.10 failed in a foreboding way: The rendering window would open, and then be black for a second, and then give way to the nondescript Windows Error box, telling me that the program had crashed. There were no traces of error messages in the log to explain why. This is called “a silent crash”. Hypothetically, it could point to a borked compiler setup.

So what I did next was to download an OGRE 1.9 SDK, which had been entirely pre-compiled by OGRE devs. But then I knew this had been a waste of time, because it nowhere proves that my compiler can actually compile. And yes, that SDK was unstable on my stronger graphics card.

I have come to learn something. Even having a Microsoft compiler does not guarantee that I will be able to compile a DirectX rendering engine. The main reason for this, is the fact that DirectX 9 is almost deprecated. The up-to-date Microsoft SDK no longer includes libraries and header files, which legacy DirectX applications linked against – including OGRE. This means that the OGRE SDK can offer DirectX 11 support, not Dx 9, and its DirectX 11 support is unstable out-of-the-box. This is ultimately a fault of the software.

What I did next was to compile OGRE 1.9 . When I was setting up the CMake parameters to do so, I realized that when I had been setting up CMake for 1.10 , I had made mistakes that could have led to severe code-linking issues. Specifically, under Windows, it is tedious how we need to link to each core-dependency one-by-one. Under Linux or MinGW these can all get picked up in an automated batch. But with MSVC, it is not so easy.

Compiling OGRE 1.9 with the OpenGL2 and the OpenGL3+ rendering engines was a success, and so finally proved that my new compiler can produce moving, 3D images. Unfortunately though, 1.9 was code that still used the deprecated way of linking to the Windows SDK for Dx 9 and 11 , so that I could not build the DirectX 11 engine after all.

I found that just with OGRE 1.9.0 , and OpenGL2, I was able to get a larger set of animations to run, from the Sample Browser, than I was on my laptop. This proves, that much of the trouble I was having with ‘Klystron’, or before that, ‘Maverick’, were in fact hardware issues.

The Iso-Surface Demo works along a different principle than I had anticipated. It is one of those applications, which use a Fragment Shader, which renders to a Vertex Buffer, set up to look like a Pixel Buffer. The Pixel format output has been cleverly engineered also to correspond to a vertex attribute structure, thus achieving what was once known as ‘a poor mans Geometry Shader’.

The Iso-Surface Demo is supposed to work, even with the OpenGL2 rendering engine. Only, on my laptop, there is no support for Render To Vertex Buffer, aka ‘R2VB’.

With OGRE 1.9 , the OpenGL3+ rendering engine remains unstable as heck, unusable.

There is an issue with how VS 2015 ultimately works. Since ‘Mithral’ possesses 8 cores, threaded as 4, VS will ultimately try to build up to 8 targets at once. This pushes performance to the max, but at the expense of stability. Today I was pushing this compiler for hours and hours – and I later learned that it truly maxes out all 8 cores.

I found a setting to correct this for the future. Given 8 cores, I would like a maximum of 6 compile targets worked on concurrently. This is just, so that the system will have a full CPU left, to work on other tasks, should things go wonky. Because by the end of the day, things did go wonky – for whatever reason.


(Edit 09/16/2016 : ) Another disadvantage, If we have an 8-core CPU, and If our compiler wants to build 8 targets concurrently for that reason, is the fact that 1 source file being compiled at a time, for each target, can consume an unpredictable amount of RAM. If the amount of RAM on the system is not taken into consideration, an ‘OOM’ (‘Out Of Memory’) condition can arise, because of the arbitrary 8 jobs running at once.

And I think that last night, such an OOM condition did arise, because I was installing tons of software… I have 8GB of RAM on ‘Mithral’. I performed numerous defragmentations as well, and, because many programs do have memory leaks, everything last night may have led up to an OOM condition by the end of the day.

I also installed Boost 1.61, and Boost 1.59, where before I only had Boost 1.47. And Boost 1.61 may in fact be necessary for OGRE 1.10 to compile, as another reason why my first attempt to compile that had failed.