What you call stack overflow appears to be what I call stack exhaustion. The two different cases are very different things when you look at what happens in memory. In computers, the stack grows down, so exhausting the stack occurs in a downward direction. When you overflow an object on the stack, this typically occurs in an upward direction, and continues until older stack frames. Downward is also possible for that case, but it is rare and when it happens it can also be the other issue at the same time.
Hearing stack overflow used to describe the other kind of issue is what prompted my reply. I had not known that others use these terms differently. In all cases, we are describing something going past a boundary, with the only difference being what, so the ambiguous usage makes sense. The ambiguous usage appears to be acknowledged by Wikipedia:
I will continue to use stack exhaustion for this, as it is more accurate.
There is also a third case, which is jumping the stack guard page. I am not sure if you consider this to be a “stack overflow” too. It is a third class of bug. Wikipedia appears to lump it together with stack exhaustion under stack overflow.
I never expected bug taxonomy to be controversial, yet here we are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_buffer_overflow
What you call stack overflow appears to be what I call stack exhaustion. The two different cases are very different things when you look at what happens in memory. In computers, the stack grows down, so exhausting the stack occurs in a downward direction. When you overflow an object on the stack, this typically occurs in an upward direction, and continues until older stack frames. Downward is also possible for that case, but it is rare and when it happens it can also be the other issue at the same time.
Hearing stack overflow used to describe the other kind of issue is what prompted my reply. I had not known that others use these terms differently. In all cases, we are describing something going past a boundary, with the only difference being what, so the ambiguous usage makes sense. The ambiguous usage appears to be acknowledged by Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_overflow_(disambiguation...
I will continue to use stack exhaustion for this, as it is more accurate.
There is also a third case, which is jumping the stack guard page. I am not sure if you consider this to be a “stack overflow” too. It is a third class of bug. Wikipedia appears to lump it together with stack exhaustion under stack overflow.
I never expected bug taxonomy to be controversial, yet here we are.