NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/lang/c-part2/11381

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 1.6 KB

Path: druid.borland.com!usenet
From: [e-mail] (Pete Becker)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Fixing stack overflow??
Date: 23 Mar 1996 17:14:20 GMT
Organization: Borland International
Distribution: world
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In article <[e-mail]>,
[e-mail] says...
>
>On 21 Mar 1996, Tom wrote:
>
>> I'm using Borland's C compiler and I am getting a stack
>> overflow.  How can I fix this?
>
>1.  Ask for a bigger stack (your compiler docs should have some ideas about
>how to do that).
>2.  Don't declare enormous arrays as local variables.
>3.  Don't rely on really deep recursion, especially if each invocation of
>the recursive function declares an enormous array. :-)

Let me add that number 1 is rarely the best answer. The key, as ever, is to
understand why the problem is occurring and then to fix it. I once had to
overhaul some code that someone else had written. They insisted that they
needed a 32k stack. The culprit was a really bad implementation of a string
class they had written that contained a 256 byte char array, combined with
string operations that created lots of temporary strings along the way. (Yes,
this was C++ code, but the point is still valid for C) Getting rid of this
beast and changing to C-style char arrays reduced the stack requirements to 8k.
    -- Pete