* Martin Buchholz: > I wrote an earlier version of this grow logic, and then it was > transplanted into other classes. > > We strongly suspect that the VM will throw OOME when we try to > allocate an array beyond MAX_ARRAY_SIZE, so are reluctant to do so, > but we also consider the VM behavior a bug that may eventually get > fixed (or is already a non-issue with a different VM). We are trying > for good behavior with both sorts of VM.
I still don't think this explains the present code. However, I wouldn't be surprised if there have been early bugs where the VM would produce a corrupt array instead of failing the allocation. But these bugs will have been fixed by now. C++ has a subclass of std::bad_alloc for certain allocations that exceed implementation limits (std::bad_array_new_length). Since memory is rarely tight when this happens, it allows providing better diagnostics.
