Issue #4040 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze). In other words, for efficiency arguments need to be passed on the stack, e.g. for JITed code. Sure it could be possible to have special handling for "too many arguments" and so something else, but that means making Ruby slower in general, which seems clearly not worth for degenerate cases such as this one. ---------------------------------------- Bug #4040: SystemStackError with Hash[*a] for Large _a_ https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/4040#change-102415 * Author: runpaint (Run Paint Run Run) * Status: Open * Priority: Normal * Assignee: ko1 (Koichi Sasada) * ruby -v: ruby 1.9.3dev (2010-11-09 trunk 29737) [x86_64-linux] * Backport: 2.2: UNKNOWN, 2.3: UNKNOWN, 2.4: UNKNOWN ---------------------------------------- =begin I've been hesitating over whether to file a ticket about this, so please feel free to close if I've made the wrong choice. I often use Hash[*array.flatten] in IRB to convert arrays of arrays into hashes. Today I noticed that if the array is big enough, this would raise a SystemStackError. Puzzled, I looked deeper. I assumed I was hitting the maximum number of arguments a method's argc can hold, but realised that the minimum size of the array needed to trigger this exception differed depending on whether I used IRB or not. So, presumably this is indeed exhausting the stack... In IRB, the following is the minimal reproduction of this problem: Hash[*130648.times.map{ 1 }]; true I haven't looked for the minimum value needed with `ruby -e`, but the following reproduces: ruby -e 'Hash[*1380888.times.map{ 1 }]' I suppose this isn't technically a bug, but maybe it offers another argument for either #666 or an extension of #3131. =end -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/