Without using recursion how can a stack overflow exception be thrown?

Question

Without using recursion how can a stack overflow exception be thrown?

Answer 1

The following applies to Windows, but most OSs implement this in a similar fashion.

The short answer is: if you touch the last guard page, it will throw.

An exception of type EXCEPTION_STACK_OVERFLOW (C00000FD) is raised when your application touches the bottom page of the stack, that is marked a PAGE_GUARD protection flag, and there is no room to grow the stack (commit one more page), see How to trap stack overflow in a Visual C++ application.
The typical case when this happens is when the stack has grown as the result of many function frames on the stack (ie. out of control recursion), as the result of fewer frames but very large frame sizes (functions with a very large local scoped object) or by explicitly allocating from the stack with _alloca.
Another way to cause the exception is to simply intentionally touch the guard page, eg. by dereferencing a pointer that points into that page. This can happen due to a variable initializion bug.

Stack overflows can occur on valid execution paths if the input causes a very deep nesting level. For instance see Stack overflow occurs when you run a query that contains a large number of arguments inside an IN or a NOT IN clause in SQL Server.