Stack overflow

In software, a stack overflow occurs if the call stack pointer exceeds the stack bound. The call stack may consist of a limited amount of address space, often determined at the start of the program. The size of the call stack depends on many factors, including the programming language, machine architecture, multi-threading, and amount of available memory. When a program attempts to use more space than is available on the call stack (that is, when it attempts to access memory beyond the call stack's bounds, which is essentially a buffer overflow), the stack is said to overflow, typically resulting in a program crash. In software, a stack overflow occurs if the call stack pointer exceeds the stack bound. The call stack may consist of a limited amount of address space, often determined at the start of the program. The size of the call stack depends on many factors, including the programming language, machine architecture, multi-threading, and amount of available memory. When a program attempts to use more space than is available on the call stack (that is, when it attempts to access memory beyond the call stack's bounds, which is essentially a buffer overflow), the stack is said to overflow, typically resulting in a program crash. The most-common cause of stack overflow is excessively deep or infinite recursion, in which a function calls itself so many times that the space needed to store the variables and information associated with each call is more than can fit on the stack. An example of infinite recursion in C. The function foo, when it is invoked, continues to invoke itself, allocating additional space on the stack each time, until the stack overflows resulting in a segmentation fault. However, some compilers implement tail-call optimization, allowing infinite recursion of a specific sort—tail recursion—to occur without stack overflow. This works because tail-recursion calls do not take up additional stack space. Some C compiler options will effectively enable tail-call optimization; for example, compiling the above simple program using gcc with -O1 will result in a segmentation fault, but not when using -O2 or -O3, since these optimization levels imply the -foptimize-sibling-calls compiler option. Other languages, such as Scheme, require all implementations to include tail-recursion as part of the language standard. A recursive function that terminates in theory but causes a call stack buffer overflow in practice can be fixed by transforming the recursion into a loop and storing the function arguments in an explicit stack (rather than the implicit use of the call stack). This is always possible, because the class of primitive recursive functions is equivalent to the class of LOOP computable functions. Consider this example in C++-like pseudocode: