C中的堆栈溢出

Question

If there is no memory left on the heap malloc will return NULL.

Is the behaviour on stack overflow defined in C?

Wikipedia suggests it's likely to cause a segfault, at least in the case of infinite recursion, but could something else happen?

Also in many managed environments, the runtime does not allow you to create arrays on the stack. Does that mean we should avoid it in native code too to guard against stack overflow, at least when the size of the array is determined at run time?

Answer 1

When you have a stack overflow, you are writing in unallocated memory. The behaviour on writing in unallocated memory is undefined, but it will probably make your program crash.

Answer 2

Does that mean we should avoid it in native code too to guard against stack overflow, at least when the size of the array is determined at run time?

Why would you avoid it? I would not avoid it because one benefit stack declared arrays have as compared to dynamic ones is that you don't have to bother with memory management issues (eg, no need to free ). This is big plus.

In rare cases if the array you want is too big and won't fit on stack, you can use dynamic arrays. There are some estimates on stack sizes too, on Windows for example in Visual Studio default stack size is 1MB. You can consider this. This size can also be increased if I am not wrong.