Why does sbt compile fail with StackOverflowError?

Question

I am working on a Scala project that has been in existence for a few years but is new to me. My task is to upgrade it from Scala 2.9.3 to 2.11.7, along with its dependencies. I

Answer 1

Relevant parts from the output of sbt -h:

  # jvm options and output control
  JAVA_OPTS          environment variable, if unset uses ""
  .jvmopts           if this file exists in the current directory, its contents
                     are appended to JAVA_OPTS
  SBT_OPTS           environment variable, if unset uses ""
  .sbtopts           if this file exists in the current directory, its contents
                     are prepended to the runner args

Thus, in my case I solved the problem by creating a file .sbtopts with content

-J-Xmx4G 
-J-Xss4M

in the project directory.

Note: Running sbt -d shows what settings have been used, for instance:

$ sbt -d
[addSbt] arg = '-debug'
[process_args] java_version = '8'
# Executing command line:
java
-Xms1024m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=128m
-XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=256m
-Xmx2G
-Xss2M
-jar
/path/to/sbt-launch.jar
-debug