R devel - May 2016 - R process killed when allocating too large matrix (Mac OS X)

Dear expeRts,

The following code leads to R being killed (under Mac OS X 10.11.4; R
installed from source; also happened under a previous unstable
version):

m <- matrix(0, 100000, 100000)

I expected an error that a vector of this size could not be allocated.

Besides the above (a bug?), how can I find out beforehand whether or
not a square matrix can be allocated?

Cheers,
Marius


PS: Here is the sessionInfo() output:

R version 3.3.0 (2016-05-03)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.11.4 (El Capitan)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

On May 3, 2016, at 9:51 PM, Marius Hofert <marius.hofert at uwaterloo.ca>
wrote:
> Dear expeRts,
> 
> The following code leads to R being killed (under Mac OS X 10.11.4; R
> installed from source; also happened under a previous unstable
> version):
> 
> m <- matrix(0, 100000, 100000)
> 
> I expected an error that a vector of this size could not be allocated.
> 
> Besides the above (a bug?), how can I find out beforehand whether or
> not a square matrix can be allocated?
> 
Can you elaborate on "leads to R being killed"? You should tell to the
killer not to do it again :).

Cheers,
Simon


> Cheers,
> Marius
> 
> 
> PS: Here is the sessionInfo() output:
> 
> R version 3.3.0 (2016-05-03)
> Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.4.0 (64-bit)
> Running under: OS X 10.11.4 (El Capitan)
> 
> locale:
> [1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
> 
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
> 
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