software is amazing... my otherwise-idle 128 GB machine just started swapping and then invoked the OOM killer to nuke a Debug + code coverage LLVM build
@regehr how much parallelism?
@whitequark @regehr build system which gracefully handles memory pressure any day now!
@dotstdy @regehr is this even a build system's job? I can see both answers being appropriate, but if "yes" then you'll have to deal with a lot of pain making a cross-platform one
@whitequark @dotstdy @regehr ninja has a concept of "pools" for exactly this sort of thing: limiting the number of concurrent linker invocations: https://ninja-build.org/manual.html#ref_pool
The Ninja build system

@tedmielczarek @whitequark @regehr yeah but that's very much the "problem is users own" approach, since the value for every concurrency limit needs to change depending on the available hardware resources.
@dotstdy @tedmielczarek @regehr but we don't have a way to predict how much memory a linker invocation will consume, do we? in which case that's sort of what we're stuck with, since any solution must necessarily be reactive

@whitequark @dotstdy @tedmielczarek @regehr
Exactly. The build system had no clue how much resources each tool invocation is going to need.

And say, the linker can only see how much memory is available on the host, not how much would actually be okay for it to use. Perhaps we need a "--mem" option for tools, analogous to the -j option for threads.