"Unable to perform link" error when compiling in RAD Studio XE8

Question

The compiler is giving me an error (shown in the pic) even if I run the IDE as an administrator. Can anyone help to solve the problem?

Answer 1

Your linker is trying to allocate 128 MB of memory. The following info from Embarcadero was recently posted on the Embarcadero forums:

Error detected (LME288) in Seattle 10 update 1

The error is an "out of memory", error. The reason for "Out Of Memory" errors (which come in different guises) in the linker, is that the linker has to pre-allocate memory in contiguous heaps that it then uses as it links, in the past these heaps could not be adjusted, we had to do a best guess, so in the new 64-bit linker (and has also been added to the 32-bit linker) we allowed people to be able adjust the size of these heaps manually when they needed to. Now the reason why these heaps can be problem is that not all systems are the same, some people use different software that map DLLs into the linker's address space like Windows Hook DLLs, antivirus software all these DLLs allocate memory INSIDE the linker's (any application really) address space and hence has an impact on the size of the heaps the linker can allocate. So we added this ability to adjust the heaps manually, but we also allocated the initial heaps quite big .

The 32bit linker has a new switch -GH, see below this is similar to the ilink64 switch.

The syntax for the switch is:

-GH= "

This option -GH exists from XE3 Update 1 onwards but evidently is not documented?

To see which heap is out of memory you can try from command line.

MSBuild /p:Platform=Win32 /v:diag XXXX.cbproj

This provides additional information such as:

Overrun on linker heap: code

Linker Heaps

---

info 0x002d0000 0x0a000000

code 0x000d0000 0x00100000

data 0x00030000 0x08000000

bss 0x08000000 0x08000000

Fatal: Out of memory

The left side of the above output is number of bytes being used at the moment and on the right the number of bytes allocated for the specific named heap.

The default heap sizes the linker allocates at start up are:

"system", default size 0x08000000
"info", default size 0x0A000000
"code", default size 0x08000000
"rodata", default size 0x06000000 //readonly data
"data", default size 0x08000000
"bss", default size 0x08000000
"tds", default size 0x0FA00000

When you see the "unknown heap" this is normally the "tds" heap

Example to adjust tds heap from 0x0FA00000 to 0x0A000000 you would do -GHtds=0x0A000000

Hopefully this information helps you and others with the LME288 error.

You can specify additional flags, such as -GH, for the linker in your Project Options.