Out of memory in !Paint

I just had an “out of memory” error in !Paint despite having bags of free RAM.

I was working on the Sprites22 file of the Sovereign theme (ie. hundreds of icon sprites). I added one icon, then did a “sort by name” OK. I added a second icon, then “sort by name” and I got the out of memory error. Saving the file (to RAM disc in this case), then sorting, fixed it.

Edit – I’ve also had several abort crashes doing “sort by name”, too, subsequently.

castle.RiscOS.Sources.Desktop.Wimp.Resources.UK.Sovereign.DiscSprites.Sprites22?

Yup, I can confirm.

Loading into !Paint, !Paint consumes 2360K.
Added sprite “test1”, MODE 28 64×64. Slot now 2372K.
Sort by name. Done, Slot still 2372K.
Added second sprite (as above). Slot now 2380K.
Sort by name → There is not enough memory to perform this operation (blah blah).

Hmmm…

I can’t seem to immediately reproduce the problem, but it does look like there’s an uninitialised variable somewhere – sometimes (usually on a fresh load of !Paint) selecting to sort by name results in a random sort order instead.

This should be fixed with !Paint 2.20 – it looks like it was a gotcha related to flex and variable-length C arrays