Re: Why do we have stack overflows?

On Thu, May 03, 2007 at 04:59:58PM -0700, 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.

Isn't it just the top of the stack that has to be treadted as a root? (maybe you need to walk the stack to find exception handlers and so on.) Maybe it shouldn't be so much worse than a heap. The Chicken Scheme system allocates everything on the C stack, and runs some sort of compacting collector when it is about to fill. Brandon