Running 'gcc' on C++ source file on Linux gives "cc1plus: out of memory allocating ..." error message

Question

I encountered a puzzling problem when compiling a C++ source file using 'gcc' on Ubuntu. Having solved the problem I would like to publish it here to save others the headache of solving it.

For the sake of this report we have the simplest possible C++ "Hello, World" program, stored in main.cpp:

#include <stdio.h>

int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
    return 0;
}

When I run the command:

gcc main.cpp

I get the error message:

cc1plus: out of memory allocating 1677721600 bytes after a total of 475136 bytes

I verified I was compiling for the correct bittage (i.e., 32-bit). What was I doing wrong?

Answer 1

It turns out I had saved the C++ source file as a UTF-16 Unicode-encoded file, complete with leading Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM) bytes at the beginning of the file. The file was saved as UTF-16 on a Windows system, committed to a version control system, then checked out to Linux. gcc does support Unicode encoded as UTF-8, but not Unicode encoded as UTF-16.

The solution was to convert the source file back to a standard, non-Unicode encoding.

Answer 2

I had the same problem in compiling a C++ program with a MAKEFILE.

I found an easy way to get rid of this problem and it is delete the existing binary file from the previous compile.

I could not identify the origin of the problem but That worked for me.