Stack Overflow

In software, a stack overflow occurs when too much memory is used on the call stack. In many programming languages, the call stack contains a limited amount of memory, usually 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 too much memory is used on the call stack the stack is said to overflow, typically resulting in a program crash.[1] This class of software bug is usually caused by one of two types of programming errors.

The most common cause of stack overflows is excessively deep or infinite recursion. Languages like Scheme, which implement tail-call optimization, allow 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.