Re:How Is Critical Life or Death Software Tested?
by albinofrenchy on Monday June 01, 2015 @08:51PM
(#9643177)
In addition to what others have said here; often recursive calls can also trivially be optimized into loops by the compiler.
This is very convenient in most cases, but could hide the fact that a direct recursive call will overflow your stack.
This isn't apparent and would test out ok until someone makes a small; seemingly insignificant change which the compiler can't do tail call optimization on, and all of a sudden things fail.
This is very convenient in most cases, but could hide the fact that a direct recursive call will overflow your stack.
This isn't apparent and would test out ok until someone makes a small; seemingly insignificant change which the compiler can't do tail call optimization on, and all of a sudden things fail.