If that's a serious TIL then you might enjoy the Ye Olde Timey classic

Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit (1996)

(OG Phrack link) http://phrack.org/issues/49/14.html (Text-zine)

(TISM Berkeley CS coursework) https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/fa08/papers/stack_smas... (PDF)

But unrelated to the stack overflow in Tim sort.

Not entirely - I wrote a lot of numerical backend code intended for 24/7/365 continuous use in the face of potentially any input .. aquisition | instrumentation equipment failures can produce glitch inputs just as damaging as delibrately crafted malicious inputs from a hacker reverse engineering existing code.

The common ground being code that has to be robust in the face of any input has to be (correctly!) verified, constrained within hard resource limits, have graceful fail over behaviour, some measure of sanity checking, etc.

Otherwise, if an e\/il hax0r doesn't get you .. mother nature and sheer bloody chance will.

I would really recommend trying to write a little C program that deliberately causes a stack overflow. It is completely harmless and is good fun if you've never encountered this kind of low-level systems code before.

It's also pretty fun to try asking for weird amounts of memory with 'malloc' or seeing how many times you can ask the OS for no memory before something fails. You might need to force-reboot your computer after that though!