Re: etex and pdftex have diverging memory constraints?

it's main memory that you are hitting so there are several differences in
the format, not least a different banner text,  You can see the memory
usage in the format by looking at


On Wed, 27 Aug 2025 at 17:35, jfbu via tex-live <[email protected]> wrote:

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> Le 27 août 2025 à 17:11, jfbu <[email protected]> a écrit :
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> You may notice this differs from what I reported initially.  I do not know
> what happened.  I think I did a rebuild of the etex format after my initial
> post in order to check the impact of main_memory.
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> Sorry for some last noise : when I wrote the initial message I was in the
> development repository of xint.  Although the macros used in the test file
> have not been modifed since 2022 and the last upload to CTAN, the file
> xintkernel.sty itself has some unrelated updates.  This impacts the
> available TeX memory hence the reported maximal value 2492694 for
> compilation with etex and 2492678 with pdftex. But with the xintkernel.sty
> from CTAN it is found to be on my system 2492701 with etex and 2492685 with
> pdftex.  And trimming the xintkernel.sty to only contain the needed support
> for the two used macros (which leaves less. than 90 lines) I get 2494089 as
> maximal value with etex and 2494074 with pdftex.
>
> Ultimately my conundrum is probably resolved by what @JonathanFine said
> about the format taking out some TeX memory. On my system etex.fmt
> has 1552667 bytes and pdftex.fmt has 1552830 bytes.  This is 167 bytes more
> but the limit in my test is only at about 15 tokens less allowed as
>
> JF
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>