[Rd] R process killed when allocating too large matrix (Mac OS X)

[Marius Hofert]

Dear expeRts,

The following code leads to R being killed (under Mac OS X 10.11.4; R
installed from source; also happened under a previous unstable
version):

m <- matrix(0, 100000, 100000)

I expected an error that a vector of this size could not be allocated.

Besides the above (a bug?), how can I find out beforehand whether or
not a square matrix can be allocated?

Cheers,
Marius


PS: Here is the sessionInfo() output:

R version 3.3.0 (2016-05-03)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.11.4 (El Capitan)

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base