I am trying to compile a one-off "script", an autogenerated C# program. This program contains 120,000 different string literals. The C# compiler can't build this, saying:
Unexpected error writing metadata to file '<removed>' -- 'No logical space left to create more user strings.'
Is there a hard limit in .NET on the number of string literals one can have in a module? What is this limit? Is there any way around it?
From MSDN :
Compiler Error CS0013: This error occures when your project builds a module with the same name as a module that is referenced by your project. That is, if your project creates a DLL named MyDll.DLL and your project also have a reference to a module with the same name (MyDll.DLL), then this error occures.
Also, there's a limitation on the size of generated assembly in Visual Studio.
Check the "BTS06 developers troubleshooting guide".
I have no idea of what the limits are in .NET but, if it is a resource limitation, I'd solve it the same way we solved running out of space in the bad old 64K-segment days.
Externalize the strings - put them in an external file and simply store the offsets (and lengths if they're not null terminated). When you need a string, load it from the file and use it.
I've never encountered this before myself, but there is some information and suggested solutions on MSDN
However, unless you have a good reason for using hard coded string literals, you should probably consider using resource files rather than literals for most strings.
There is a limit on the number of strings in an assembly, just as there are limits on the number of classes, fields, etc. Each of these is identified with a 32-bit metadata token, where the upper-most byte is a meta-type-code, and the lower bits are the individual data record. For strings, they actually identify an offset into the string heap, so you can have at most 2**24 bytes for strings, i.e. 16MiB. Not sure whether strings are stored in UTF-8 or UTF-16.