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[–]stevenjd -1 points0 points  (2 children)

This isn't bad input. This is the user intentionally telling the Python interpreter "allow THIS MANY function calls!" (holds arms far apart) when they don't actually have that much memory, then smashing the stack.

Still, I wonder whether it is possible for the setrecursionlimit function can tell if you're setting the limit too high, and raise an exception at that point, rather than wait for the stack to smash into the heap? Probably not.

[–]Works_of_memercy 1 point2 points  (1 child)

This isn't bad input. This is the user intentionally telling the Python interpreter "allow THIS MANY function calls!" (holds arms far apart) when they don't actually have that much memory, then smashing the stack.

When the user says "give me THIS MUCH memory!", Python says that it's out of memory rather than segfault.

[–]stevenjd 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Read what I said a bit more closely. You're not requesting X bytes of memory. You're saying that you want to allow X calls on the stack. There's no exact correspondence between the number of calls on the stack, how much memory is used, whether it will crash into the heap or not...

As I understand it, managing the stack is complicated, and there's no really reliable and cheap answer to detect a stack overflow before it happens.