Glulx Size

Hiya.

The size of my code is starting to swell and swell and swell with great ease, and I just want to know, are there walls to Glulx just like the Z-machine (which I b****ed about in an earlier thread)?

I’d rather not get blindsided.

Yes, in theory, but I don’t think anyone’s ever hit them. I think the maximum file size is something like 2 gigabytes.

You can make a source text with something like half a million words in it and it won’t hit the Glulx file size limits. Right now the compiler seems to choke on source files of about that size (bug one, bug two), but you’re not going to get blindsided by that anytime soon.

“soon” being the key word there. Perhaps Inform version 8 will make Glulx feel as cramped as Inform 7 makes version 8 of the z-machine feel. :smiley:

who’s working on inform 8 ?

No one. There are no plans for Inform 8. And Glulx has 4000 times the memory capacity of the Z-Machine. You won’t hit its limits.

promise?

Considering the bugs that matt w linked to, that’s a bit simplistic. :slight_smile: He won’t hit its limits, but even though it’s extremely, amazingly, extraordinarily unlikely, he might hit the compiler’s limits.

Blue Lacuna, Counterfeit Monkey, and Hadean Lands did not run into Glulx size limits (or compiler bugs).

If you’re planning a game the size of Flexible Survival, you may have problems. But only if you actually make the game that size. :confused:

just curious, but what would it take to fill up a GLULX game?

It’s really not going to happen. The problem referenced above is a bug in the compiler which Graham says is now fixed. As an example, I just wrote a simple Glulx story which prints the entire text of the Aeneid (over sixty thousand words) at the beginning. This brought me to just over 0.04% of the Glulx file size limit.

I can’t believe you typed out the whole Aeneid for the start of your game. Boy, you’re crazy!

Haha, I got the text from thelatinlibrary.com and ran some regexes to get rid of invalid characters. I don’t have nearly enough stamina to type out the whole thing by hand.

I know that’s what you want me to believe… but I’m watching you.

The Aeneid has more than six thousand words, doesn’t it?

You are correct, that was a typo on my part. Fixed.

Inform 8. :laughing: Perhaps I should start assembling a chart showing file sizes over time, starting back with the very first games decades ago. I suspect that such a chart would show the average sizes trending steadily upward. My prediction is that the trend continues, eventually overtaking the Glulx VM at some future date.

Perhaps it’ll be Inform 8, in the coming years and decades once it actually exists. Granted, there are no plans for it (right now) but the z-machine’s been around for 36 years. Who knows what the IF scene will look like in another 36. (Or, just for future-proofing in case Inform itself isn’t around in 36 years, then whatever suitable replacement(s) exist at that time.)

Perhaps files will be big because it (somehow) addresses Brian Moriarty’s so-called “scandal” or perhaps for other as-yet-unknown reasons, all of which will seem perfectly reasonable things to do at the time but which of course help to continue the trend that my chart would surely show, if it existed.

In any event and whatever the reasons, hopefully I’ll still be around at that point to see if my prediction is correct. :slight_smile:

Your point being?.. One game DID run into the size limits, and it’s by no means a traditional game, but if the limits were reached once, then they are there and may be reached again. As extremely, amazingly, extraordinarily unlikely as that is.

It didn’t hit the limits per se. Its size ran up against a latent problem in the Inform compiler, which Graham says is now fixed.

Sounds a lot like hitting a limit. Just not the same sort of limit.

That’s brilliant! I had no idea, it’s very good news indeed. I wonder when we can expect to see that fix in action, though - for the sake of the guys who are actually trying to work around that at this very moment.