Yes and no. In theory it would be totally fine to "allocate" a stack that was exobytes in size (or whatever extremely large number). Thanks to virtual memory

Yes and no. In theory it would be totally fine to "allocate" a stack that was exobytes in size (or whatever extremely large number). Thanks to virtual memory no one really cares... if that memory isn't actually being used. But as your stack grows larger and larger the OS has to find pages of physical memory to assign to that allocation, and you're simply going to run out of memory. A high end home PC or average server is only going to have 64-128 GB of RAM, a very high end server might have a few TB. Of course when you start to run out of physical memory the OS will start paging (dumping data from RAM to disk to free up memory), but that will kill the performance of your app even with high end SSD's. If you keep chugging along with your stack growth you'll probably hit OS limits on page file size next, if not you'll eventually run out of disk space.