[racket] (Practical) Limits of Apply?

Well, the following program

#lang racket

(for ((log-length (in-range 23)))
  (let ((length (expt 2 log-length)))
    (printf "Applying append to list of ~a singletons~%" length)
    (time (apply append (for/list ((i (in-range length))) (list i))))))

Runs fine for me---the final stage reports

Applying append to list of 4194304 singletons
cpu time: 3270 real time: 3276 gc time: 2739

Going to 2^24 takes at least 1.1 GB of memory on my machine, and I was forced to kill the process due to swapping (I have several other active processes running).  So, I guess the answer to my question is: "there is no limit on apply that takes effect before basic memory limits".  Hopefully others will find this useful as well.

Will


On Aug 24, 2010, at 12:36 PM, Robby Findler wrote:

> Try it out and see. I believe that the below is considered a common
> idiom and that Matthew has probably done some work to make it work
> well, but the contribution of a stress test is always welcome.
> 
> Robby
> 
> On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Will M. Farr <wmfarr at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello all,
>> 
>> I recently encountered some library code of the form
>> 
>> (apply append list-of-lists)
>> 
>> where list-of-lists could be essentially arbitrarily long (i.e. list-of-lists came from clients of the library, and therefore could be anything).  I didn't try to break it, but it made me a little nervous---I know that other Schemes have limits on the number of arguments that can come through apply.  In practice, should I be worried about using apply on, say, 1M-element argument lists?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Will
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