Stack Overflow - Very Deep or Infinite Recursion

Very Deep or Infinite Recursion

The most common cause of stack overflow is excessively deep or infinite recursion. Languages like Scheme, which implement tail-call optimization, allow infinite recursion of a specific sort—tail recursion—to occur without stack overflow. This works because tail-recursion calls do not take up additional stack space.

An example of infinite recursion in C.

The function foo, when it is invoked, continues to invoke itself, using additional space on the stack each time, until the stack overflows resulting in a segmentation fault.