title: Are there limits on the size of file that can be compiled in Visual Studio C?
body: <p>I am working on a C# program that produces a very large piece of C code. It produces a .c file and accompanying header file. On a very basic level, the program accepts a string from the user, then compares it to thousands of other strings that have been placed in the header file during autogen. </p>
  
  <p>The header file contains over 800k lines of code and the .c file contains around 300k. As you can imagine, these are very large files. Now, I realise that having such a large file is bad coding practice. The best thing would be to break this file down into smaller files and compile it that way, but can we assume that this two file structure is necessary for how my project will be used in the grand scheme of things.</p>
  
  <p>With that in mind, I'm having trouble compiling this program in the Visual Studio IDE and with the command line. Infact, that's not entirely true. It appears to compile okay each time I try it with either method (admittedly it takes a while). However, when I come to run the program, problems develop. It reaches the input loop just fine, but after accepting user input, the program crashes with the following error:</p>
  
  <p>"Unhandled exception at 0x008105f9 in Prototype.exe: 0xC0000005: Access violation writing location 0x00000000."</p>
  
  <p>I'm fairly sure this is not my code causing the problem. I have run a version of this code generated in debug mode which is a lot smaller and it runs fine. The only difference is the volume of strings that have been written to the header file by the C# program. The size of the smaller files are 14k and 5k lines respectively. Also, the IDE does not allow me to use breakpoints to debug after compiling and running with the full sized code, whereas my smaller code does. </p>
  
  <p>My question would be this: Is there any limit or issue that the C language or the Visual Studio compiler has with single large files that would be causing the error above? If so, is there any way to circumvent this limit while retaining my two-file structure? I have tried increasing heap and stack sizes to 4mb in the properties dialouge, but this does not help.</p>
  
  <p>I realise that this is an abnormal way to produce and run code, but I would be appreciative of any advice.</p>