> I've done that in lots of languages, but it usually means I was trying to crash the compiler :-)
It's a real problem.
Anecdotally: I maintain a Debian package with a large-ish (but far from huge), template-heavy C++ codebase. I had to give up on compiling on 32 bit machines long ago, simply because not enough addressable memory was available to the compiler. I know other maintainers have to heavily tune the compiler to work around the problem, too.
I was once asked by the Ubuntu folks to disable parallel builds altogether, due to even their 64 bit builders running out of memory altogether.
And this package is just large-ish – it's nowhere near truly large (like a browser or an office suite).
I remember there was some simple way to crash a Haskell compiler with an out of memory error by defining a series of types, where each successive type required twice as much memory as the previous type to represent.