C stack frame sizes

[Doug Gwyn <gwyn>]

> Has anyone ever empirically studied the sizes of C stack frames for UNIX
> applications?  The particular question I have is:  How serious would a
> 65kbyte maximum frame size be for a 32 bit machine.

I have recently had some practical experience with this issue.  On the
Gould UTX-32 system (and I believe on IBM 370s too), the architecture
rather strongly encouraged the C/UNIX implementors to use a relatively
small chunk of address space for the run-time stack.  The exact amount
can be adjusted when one link-edits a binary executable image; using
around 24Kb worked well for nearly all UNIX System V utilities.  64Kb
would probably suffice for almost all applications; those having trouble
most likely could be fixed by changing large "auto" arrays to "static".
I have yet to see a practical example where a huge amount of recursion
was required; however, if one turned up, it would not be easy to fix.

So a SINGLE stack frame limit of 64Kb would certainly not be very
troublesome.  I imagine someone has written code that needs more, but
they have already severely limited their target machine choices.