John Meacham wrote:
I believe it is because a stack cannot be garbage collected, and must be traversed as roots for every garbage collection. I don't think there are any issues with a huge stack per se, but it does not play nice with garbage collection so may hurt your performance and memory usage in unforeseen ways.
I'm still not convinced :-( I also don't believe it's in anybodys interest to have programs failing for no good reason. A good reason to fail is if overall memory demands are getting stupid. Failing because the stack has grown beyond some arbitrary (and typically small) size seems bad to me. I know that this is to a certain extent this is controllable using RTS options, but this is no use to me as a library writer tying to chose between stackGobbler and heapGobbler. The stuff should "just work" and not be dependent on the right RTS incantations being used when the final program is run. Regards -- Adrian Hey