Question

I am trying to include huge string in my c++ programs, Its size is 20598617 characters , I am using #define to achieve it. I have a header file which contains this statement

#define "<huge string containing 20598617 characterd>"

When I try to compile the program I get error as fatal error C1060: compiler is out of heap space

I tried following command line options with no success

/Zm200
/Zm1000
/Zm2000

How can I make successful compilation of this program?

Platform: Windows 7

Answer 1

You can’t, not reliably. Even if it will compile, it’s liable to break the runtime library, or the OS assumptions, and so forth.

If you tell us why you’re trying to do it, we can offer lots of alternatives. Deciding how to handle arbitrarily large data is a major part of programming.

Edited to add:

Rather than guess, I looked into MSDN:

Prior to adjacent strings being
concatenated, a string cannot be
longer than 16380 single-byte
characters.

A Unicode string of about one half
this length would also generate this
error.

The page concludes:

You may want to store exceptionally
large string literals (32K or more) in
a custom resource or an external file.

What do other compilers say?

Further edited to add:

I created a file like this:

char s[] = {'x','x','x','x'};

I kept doubling the occurrences of 'x', testing each one as an #include file.

An 8388608 byte string succeeded; 16777216 bytes failed, with the “out of heap space” error.