maximum size for an array of floats?

[ausairman]

Hello,
I'm trying to process large amounts of data, so I've set up a series of arrays to achieve this.

However, I notice that my program crashes when I try to create an array of floats with more than 500,000 elements.

When I try to run a compiled program with this in it:

float myarray [600000];

I get an exception "your program has stopped working" message.

The size of such an array is almost exactly 2MB, so I suspect there is some artificial restriction on array sizes that I am not aware of. I am running windows 7 64bit with 8GB of ram, using dev-C++ bloodshed.

Thanks for the help!

[firedraco]

It's a limit on how much stack memory your process gets. You could probably do it by using the heap instead.

[ausairman]

Makes sense.
Cheers!

[chipp]

using the heap instead

what is heap? how to use it?

[Zhuge]

Try this:
http://cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/dynamic/

[ausairman]

I understand the concept but I'm still a bit foggy on some specifics. For example, suppose I have a structure that I would declare like this:

struct mystruct {
  int myarray [50];
};

can I now create an array of this structure on the heap by doing this:

mystruct * pointer = new mystruct [length]

if that's the case, what exactly does pointer now point to? Can I then access the ith structure of the array with *pointer[i]?

[chipp]

oh, that...

[firedraco]

Pointer is pointing to an array of mystructs. If you want to access the ith element, you don't need the extra *, the [] already is dereferencing it for you.