Why do we have stack overflows?

[Simon Marlow]

Adrian Hey wrote:
> John Meacham wrote:
>> I believe it is because a stack cannot be garbage collected, and must be
>> traversed as roots for every garbage collection. I don't think there are
>> any issues with a huge stack per se, but it does not play nice with
>> garbage collection so may hurt your performance and memory usage in
>> unforeseen ways.
> 
> I'm still not convinced :-(
> 
> I also don't believe it's in anybodys interest to have programs
> failing for no good reason. A good reason to fail is if overall
> memory demands are getting stupid. Failing because the stack has
> grown beyond some arbitrary (and typically small) size seems
> bad to me.
> 
> I know that this is to a certain extent this is controllable
> using RTS options, but this is no use to me as a library
> writer tying to chose between stackGobbler and heapGobbler.
> 
> The stuff should "just work" and not be dependent on the right
> RTS incantations being used when the final program is run.

I'm more than happy to change the defaults, if there's some agreement on what 
the defaults should be.  The current choice is somewhat historical - we used to 
have a bound on both heap size and stack size, but the heap size bound was 
removed because we felt that on balance it made life easier for more people, at 
the expense of a bit more pain when you write a leaky program.

Also, it used to be the case that the OOM killer could be a bit unpredictable, 
killing vital system processes instead of the leaky Haskell program.  I'm not 
sure if this is still true for current OS incarnations.

Cheers,
	Simon