Hi, I was only recently made aware that this registry key exists. I thought it might be useful to other developers developing for the Windows platform. This can help with detecting pointer truncation bugs on the Windows platform (and then also benefit cross-platform applications)
I hope somebody can find this useful. Tips & Tricks: AllocationPreference Registry Key ================================================ If you're not a software developer, then you would never have any need to set this registry key, and you would never be affected by any of the issues that it causes. If you are a developer, then adding AllocationPreference with a value of 0x100000 under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\ and rebooting your PC will make Windows allocate memory from the top down. That is, memory allocations will start from the highest possible pointer value and then go down on subsequent allocations, instead of starting from the lowest possible pointer value and then go up. The key benefit is that it detects pointer truncation bugs, where a 64-bit application casts pointers to or from 32-bit instead of 64-bit integers. Such bugs can now be found much more quickly. You'll get pointer values beyond 2^32 right away, instead of only after your application has allocated more than 4 GB of RAM. It will likely cause any 64-bit application which has such bugs to crash, so it's best to do these tests in a virtual machine. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
