These tests try to find out the practical limits of the length of list in (apply + list). I used make-list to construct a list of one million zeros and invoked the above apply. If it worked, I tested no further; if it crashed, I read the error messages and when necessary tested with shorter lists.
These tests were done on a 64-bit Linux system.
1000000 arguments works correctly: Racket, Gauche, Bigloo, Kawa, SISC, SCM, Larceny, IronScheme, NexJ, JScheme, SigScheme, Scheme 9, KSi, Shoe, Rep, Schemik, FemtoLisp, Dfsch, Inlab, Oaklisp, Sagittarius, Chibi
500000 arguments works correctly: Scheme48/scsh
100000 arguments works correctly: S7, Chicken 5
10000 arguments works correctly: Guile, Mosh, XLisp, TinyScheme, Elk, Llava, SXM, S7, STklos (default stack size) [*]
6500 arguments works correctly: Sizzle
1000 arguments works correctly: BDC
Hard limit is 126937 arguments: MIT
Hard limit is 8192 arguments: Gambit, Vicare
Hard limit is 2048 arguments: Chicken 4
Hard limit is 2026 arguments: Foment
Hard limit is 998 arguments: RScheme
Cannot run test: UMB, Owl Lisp
[*]: If STklos is started with -s 10000000 then it will support the initial test with one million arguments.
Common Lisp implementations:
(progn (setq args (make-list K :initial-element 1)) T)
(apply #'+ args)
The maximum K for which the above works is: