Re: stack overflow at compile time

Henry Spencer wrote:
(snip on stack size bounds at compile time)


> This is true, but uninteresting. :-) All real programs are special cases
> of one kind or another, as witness the fact that human beings reason
> effectively (if not always correctly) about their programs' halting
> behavior all the time.


> In the absence of recursion or non-trivial dynamic allocation, bounding
> stack size at compile time is obviously a straightforward problem:
> generate the call graph, label each arc with the stack size of the routine
> being called, and find the greatest "distance" from the root to a leaf.
> The maximum may occur on a path that's actually impossible, but at least
> you do get a bound.


But it is difficult to tell at compile time which routines are actually
called, even though you may know there is no recursion and only fixed
sized allocation. You could, then, way overestimate the stack usage.


With recursion you could easily underestimate it, not knowing the
maximum recursion level.


-- glen

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