Re: etex and pdftex have diverging memory constraints?

Hi Jean-François

TeX can be asked to tell us how much memory it has used. I will give a
simple example below. From this output we can calculate how much memory is
left, and thus the huge number that is the upper limit. If the actual upper
limit is not as calculated, there is an error in TeX, or in our
understanding.

with kind regards

Jonathan

jfine@mypc:~> tex /dev/null '\tracingstats 2 \end'
This is TeX, Version 3.141592653 (TeX Live 2025/TeX Live for SUSE Linux)
(preloaded format=tex)
(/dev/null)
No pages of output.
Transcript written on null.log.

jfine@lemon:~> cat null.log
This is TeX, Version 3.141592653 (TeX Live 2025/TeX Live for SUSE Linux)
(preloaded format=tex 2025.8.27)  27 AUG 2025 16:33
**/dev/null \tracingstats 2 \end
(/dev/null)
Here is how much of TeX's memory you used:
 4 strings out of 497970
 31 string characters out of 6220722
 5900 words of memory out of 5000000
 926 multiletter control sequences out of 15000+600000
 14794 words of font info for 50 fonts, out of 8000000 for 9000
 14 hyphenation exceptions out of 8191
 0i,0n,0p,1b,6s stack positions out of 10000i,1000n,20000p,200000b,200000s

No pages of output.