Trying this with GCC gives me a segfault (although I had to go higher up to 8 MB).

    #include <stdio.h>

    int main(void) {
      char x[8388608];
      printf("%ld\n", sizeof(x));
      return 0;
    }

My point was that Visual C++ 2010 gives a different error, but it was running in debug mode.

And my point was that GCC was not as helpful in that case. :-) With the GNU C library you will have to install your own signal handlers and jump through a lot of hoops to get anything more sensible than a "segmentation fault" error. You would think our tools would be a bit more modern by now.

Oh by the way, I'm not sure if it was exactly 5MB, it might actually have been 2MB. This particular case was 2 years ago, now.