Vulnerability in the functional programming paradigm?

Question

A few days ago, there were a couple questions on buffer overflow vulnerabilities (such as Does Java have buffer overflows?, Secure C and the universities - trained for buffer ov

Answer 1

It may be possible to more easily cause unbounded recursion (and the resulting memory use) in a functional implementation than in the corresponding imperative implementation. While an imperative program might just go into an infinite loop when processing malformed input data, a functional program may instead gobble up all the memory it can while doing the same processing. Generally, it would be the responsibility of the VM in which the program is running to limit the amount of memory a particular process can consume. (Even for native Unix processes, ulimit can provide this protection.)