Question

Inspired by this question.

Apparently in the following code:

#include <Windows.h>

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
    if( GetTickCount() > 1 ) {
        char buffer[500 * 1024];
        SecureZeroMemory( buffer, sizeof( buffer ) );
    } else {
        char buffer[700 * 1024];
        SecureZeroMemory( buffer, sizeof( buffer ) );
    }
    return 0;
}

compiled with default stack size (1 megabyte) with Visual C++ 10 with optimizations on (/O2) a stack overflow occurs because the program tries to allocate 1200 kilobytes on stack.

The code above is of course slightly exaggerated to show the problem – uses lots of stack in a rather dumb way. Yet in real scenarios stack size can be smaller (like 256 kilobytes) and there could be more branches with smaller objects that would induce a total allocation size enough to overflow the stack.

That makes no sense. The worst case would be 700 kilobytes – it would be the codepath that constructs the set of local variables with the largest total size along the way. Detecting that path during compilation should not be a problem.

So the compiler produces a program that tries to allocate even more memory than the worst case. According to this answer LLVM does the same.

That could be a deficiency in the compiler or there could be some real reason for doing it this way. I mean maybe I just don’t understand something in compilers design that would explain why doing allocation this way is necessary.

Why would the compiler want a program allocate more memory than the code needs in the worst case?

Answer 1

The following code when compiled using GCC 4.5.1 on ideone places the two arrays at the same address:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
  int x;
  std::cin >> x;

  if (x % 2 == 0)
  {
    char buffer[500 * 1024]; 
    std::cout << static_cast<void*>(buffer) << std::endl;
  }

  if (x % 3 == 0)
  {
    char buffer[700 * 1024]; 
    std::cout << static_cast<void*>(buffer) << std::endl;
  }
}

input: 6

output:
0xbf8e9b1c
0xbf8e9b1c

The answer is probably “use another compiler” if you want this optimization.