Compiler chokes on large source trees

[ehberger]

With more than about 250 coffeescript files, a call to the compiler fails.

Repro:
In an empty directory:
Create 250 empty .coffee files
for i in seq 1 250; do touch $i.coffee; done
then try to compile them
coffee -c .

Observed:
I've seen a couple of failures, all seemingly related to running out of file descriptors.
One full run:

eric:coffee eric$ for i in `seq 1 250`; do touch $i.coffee; done
eric:coffee eric$ coffee -c .
(libuv) Failed to create kqueue (24)
(libuv) Failed to create kqueue (24)

events.js:72
        throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
              ^
Error: write EBADF
  at errnoException (net.js:901:11)
  at WriteStream.Socket._write (net.js:643:26)
  at doWrite (_stream_writable.js:221:10)
  at writeOrBuffer (_stream_writable.js:211:5)
  at WriteStream.Writable.write (_stream_writable.js:180:11)
  at WriteStream.Socket.write (net.js:613:40)
  at printLine (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/coffee-script/lib/coffee-script/command.js:27:27)
  at /usr/local/lib/node_modules/coffee-script/lib/coffee-script/command.js:459:20
  at fs.js:944:21
  at Object.oncomplete (fs.js:107:15)

Expected:
I would expect it to queue up some reasonable number of parallel files instead of opening everything at once, or to recover gracefully from the failure.

I searched for related issues and found several related to watch (e.g. #1537 and #2004 ) which have been closed as non-fixable due to hard OS limitations on number of open files, but for a compilation it seems like there should be no issue with just limiting the number of concurrent operations.

Would a patch for this be welcome?

[jashkenas]

A patch for this would be welcome ... but the easy fix is just to up your ulimit. You often have to do that anyways, these days.