Is it undefined behavior to exceed translation limits and are there checker tools to find it?

Question

ORIGINAL QUESTION:

I\'m searching the C90 standard for things to be aware of, when writing hignly portable code, while having low trust in the good will of the compile

Answer 1

In some environments, an application may receive stack space equal to the total memory available, minus the combined size of the code and static data. If the amount of available memory memory will not be known until an effort is made to run a program, it may be impossible for the compiler, linker, or any other such tool to know if it will be adequate. Nothing in the standard imposes any requirements upon what must happen if an attempt is made to run a program when insufficient memory is available to handle its stack requirements.

It would be helpful if the Standard provided a means by which a program could ensure some measure of predictable behavior when run with any amount of memory available, but at present it does not do so. On many platforms, there will be some amount of available memory which will be large enough that the OS loader won't reject an executable, but will nonetheless be small enough that the application suffers a stack overflow almost immediately upon start-up. The authors of the C standard didn't want to declare that C cannot be used with such platforms, but they also can't really say anything about what platforms will do when trying to run code with that critical amount of memory.