Crashes while looking for helper files in huge project subdirectories

Currently, ava looks for helper files in all project subdirectories excluding node_modules:

https://github.com/avajs/ava/blob/master/lib/ava-files.js#L90-L95

This can overwhelm ava when there exists subdirectories that are huge and/or with complicated fs hierarchies:

FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_LAST Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory
 1: node::Abort() [ava]
 2: 0x126389c [ava]
 3: v8::Utils::ReportOOMFailure(char const*, bool) [ava]
 4: v8::internal::V8::FatalProcessOutOfMemory(char const*, bool) [ava]
 5: v8::internal::Factory::NewInternalizedStringImpl(v8::internal::Handle<v8::internal::String>, int, unsigned int) [ava]
 6: v8::internal::StringTable::LookupString(v8::internal::Isolate*, v8::internal::Handle<v8::internal::String>) [ava]
 7: v8::internal::LookupIterator::PropertyOrElement(v8::internal::Isolate*, v8::internal::Handle<v8::internal::Object>, v8::internal::Handle<v8::internal::Object>, bool*, v8::internal::LookupIterator::Configuration) [ava]
 8: v8::internal::Runtime_KeyedGetProperty(int, v8::internal::Object**, v8::internal::Isolate*) [ava]
 9: 0x126964c063a7
Aborted (core dumped)

Allowing the specification of exclusion globs for helper files would help prevent this. We reverted back to v0.17.0 for now.

Environment: node v7.4.0 linux 4.2.0-34-generic ava v0.18.1

[wmertens]

There are a number of issues related to this and the fix is very simple: clear/customize the helper matcher patterns.

Would it not be possible to roll out a quick fix for this by making a helperPatterns option that replaces the default one? For people that transpile everything they can then clear that array.

[maschwenk]

I see this is a thoroughly discussed issue. Is there any workaround outside of forking and emptying that const array?