If you have to work in an environment where stack size is very limited (typically a few KiB) you have to pay attention to certain things that you can brush away

If you have to work in an environment where stack size is very limited (typically a few KiB) you have to pay attention to certain things that you can brush away in more generous environment. In particular you need to be very careful with recursive functions and you probably want to use the heap or static storage for any object bigger than a couple dozens bytes. But in my experience you don't really compute a "guaranteed" stack size, you use your experience and knowledge of the program to make an educated guess, and then you apply a reasonable multiplier to give you some security margin. If you don't use (or severely limit) recursive calls you can usually just check that your deepest call stack fits within the bounds. Although finding the deepest call stack in the first place can be tricky given that compilers can aggressively inline function calls.