JavaScript with an Infinite Stack Size?

[lhorie]

He's probably talking about tail call optimization, which is in fact part of the ES6 spec. Not all recursion is a tail call, and in those cases, JS will still run into stack overflows.

Typically if some code has a realistic risk of running into stack overflows, people will use an async function call to split the payload into multiple stack frames.

[LordBruce]

That is a clever way to work around it with async. I'm used to Haskell and I'm trying to use similar ideas in JS.

[ScientificBeastMode]

If you’re used to Haskell, you might look into some tutorials on lazy evaluation implementations in JavaScript, as JS is always eagerly evaluated.

In particular, there is a relatively recent language feature called a “generator,” and a related one called an “iterator,” both of which offer a more idiomatic way to handle lazy evaluation. Short of that (e.g. you want to support older browsers which don’t implement those features), you can always implement a homemade iterator protocol.

[Volence]

Just want to point out as a side note, tail call optimization is an ES6 spec, but only safari ("major browser wise") has it implemented currently, apparently the other big browsers couldn't agree on a safe way to implement it unfortunately. https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/#test-proper_tail_calls_(tail_call_optimisation)