FatLimit

FatLimit is a term used in several programming projects to denote a threshold related to fat data structures or fat pointers—structures that carry extra metadata such as length, capacity, or type information alongside a value. The exact meaning of fatLimit is not universal; it is typically defined by a specific project or library and represents a numeric upper bound that constrains resources or processing complexity.

In common usage, fatLimit serves as a guardrail to prevent unbounded growth of data structures or metadata. It may be implemented as a constant, a configurable parameter, or a runtime setting. When a data structure or operation would exceed fatLimit, the software usually signals an error or aborts the operation to avoid excessive memory use or degraded performance.

Contexts where fatLimit appears include memory and pointer systems that use fat pointers with metadata, serialization or deserialization routines that carry payload and metadata, and APIs that accept variable-sized inputs. In each case, fatLimit helps enforce safety and predictability by bounding the amount of data processed or stored at once.

Typical implementation patterns involve checking sizes against fatLimit before allocation or traversal, providing clear error handling, and documenting the rationale for the chosen bound. Some projects expose fatLimit as a tunable parameter to balance safety with performance, while others fix it to conservative defaults to minimize the risk of resource exhaustion.

See also: fat pointer, bounds checking, input validation, resource limits.