Can you give an example of stack overflow in C++?

Question

Can you give an example of stack overflow in C++? Other than the recursive case:

void foo() { foo(); }

Answer 1

Here's one that might happen in practice:

int factorial(int x) {
  return x == 0 ? 1 : x * factorial(x-1);
}

This overflows the stack for negative x. And, as Frank Krueger mentioned, also for too large x (but then int would overflow first).

Answer 2

Compile-time example:

template <int N>
struct Factorial {
    enum { value = N * Factorial<N - 1>::value };
};

// ...
{
    int overflow = Factorial<10>::value;
}

Answer 3

Please see Stack overflow - Wikipedia. I have linked directly to the examples section.

Answer 4

As per edit :-)

void ping()
{
  pong();
}

void pong()
{
ping();
}

Also, I believe you can get stack overflow if you try to allocate more space than maximum thread stack size ( 1MB by default in VS), so something like int a[100000]; should provide the exception.

Answer 5

I can't believe we left off the greatest recursion example of all time, factorial!

#include <stdio.h>

double fact(double n) {
    if (n <= 0) return 1;
    else return n * fact(n - 1);
}

int main() {
    printf("fact(5) = %g\n", fact(5));
    printf("fact(10) = %g\n", fact(10));
    printf("fact(100) = %g\n", fact(100));
    printf("fact(1000) = %g\n", fact(1000));
    printf("fact(1000000) = %g\n", fact(1000000));
}

On OS X 10.5.8 with GCC 4.0.1:

$ gcc f.c -o f && ./f
fact(5) = 120
fact(10) = 3.6288e+06
fact(100) = 9.33262e+157
fact(1000) = inf
Segmentation fault

Unfortunately, OS X reports a "Segmentation fault" instead of a "Stack overflow". Too bad.

Answer 6

void function()
{
 function();
}