Home/ Questions/Q 1076043
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-16T21:21:22+00:00

I’m used to debug my code using ghci. Often, something like this happens (not

  • 0

I’m used to debug my code using ghci. Often, something like this happens (not so obvious, of course):

ghci> let f@(_:x) = 0:1:zipWith(+)f x
ghci> length f

Then, nothing happens for some time, and if I don’t react fast enough, ghci has eaten maybe 2 GB of RAM, causing my system to freeze. If it’s too late, the only way to solve this problem is [ALT] + [PRINT] + [K].

My question: Is there an easy way to limit the memory, which can be consumed by ghci to, let’s say 1 GB? If limit is exceed, the calculation should ve aborted or ghci should be killed.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A platform independant way to accomplish this is to supply the -M option as on option to the Haskell runtime like this

    ghci +RTS -M1m

    see the GHC documentation’s page on how to control the RTS (runtime system) for details.

    The ghci output now looks like:

    >ghci +RTS -M10m
GHCi, version 6.12.3: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help
Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done.
Loading package integer-gmp ... linking ... done.
Loading package base ... linking ... done.
Loading package ffi-1.0 ... linking ... done.
Prelude> let f@(_:x) = 0:1:zipWith(+)f x
Prelude> length f
Heap exhausted;
Current maximum heap size is 10485760 bytes (10 MB);
use `+RTS -M<size>' to increase it.
    • 0