Why am I getting “Invalid Allocation Size: 4294967295 Bytes” instead of an std::bad_alloc exception?

Question

I wrote the following piece of code to allocate memory for an array:

try {
    int n = 0;
    cin >> n;
    double *temp = new double[n];
    ...
}
cat         


        

Answer 1

On a 32-bit system, your virtual memory address space cannot exceed 2^31-1 (4294967295) bytes.

You are attempting to allocate 536000000*sizeof(double) bytes, which is obviously more than that.