> So, do we just prohibit recursion? This is what MISRA C does > Do we need to have a privileged compiler (making signed executables) that refuses to generate

> So, do we just prohibit recursion? This is what MISRA C does > Do we need to have a privileged compiler (making signed executables) that refuses to generate code unless the stack usage can be proven at compile time? This is roughly what the Linux kernel does (I believe it's more a set of checks that aren't formally proven) So yes, if you want to have run a process reliably, you shouldn't be doing any potentially unbounded recursion. > We've just moved it to the developer making promises that he probably can't verify to be safe. I don't agree, programs get a pretty large amount of stack space by default, and as long as you aren't doing any crazy amount of alloca or recursion (which is in fact the case for most programs), you'll be fine. They may not be formally verified to be safe, but practically the are. OTOH, the OOM killer can take you down regardless of what you're doing, based on what other processes are doing, so developers can have no assurance whatsoever that their programs won't suddenly die. Anecdotally, I've only even seen stack overflows due to infinite recursion bugs that are caught during development, but I see OOM-related problems not at all infrequently.