Why infinite recursion leads to seg fault

Question

Why infinite recursion leads to seg fault ? Why stack overflow leads to seg fault. I am looking for detailed explanation.

int f()
{
  f();
}

int main()
{
           


        

Answer 1

Your system resources are finite. They are limited. Even if your system has the most memory and storage on the entire Earth, infinite is WAY BIGGER than what you have. Remember that now.

The only way to do something an "infinite number of times" is to "forget" previous information. That is, you have to "forget" what has been done before. Otherwise you have to remember what happened before and that takes storage of one form or another (cache, memory, disk space, writing things down on paper, ...)--this is inescapable. If you are storing things, you have a finite amount of space available. Recall, that infinite is WAY BIGGER than what you have. If you try to store an infinite amount of information, you WILL run out of storage space.

When you employ recursion, you are implicitly storing previous information with each recursive call. Thus, at some point you will exhaust your storage if you try to do this an infinite number of takes. Your storage space in this case is the stack. The stack is a piece of finite memory. When you use it all up and try to access beyond what you have, the system will generate an exception which may ultimately result in a seg fault if the memory it tried to access was write-protected. If it was not write-protected, it will keep on going, overwriting god-knows-what until such time as it either tries to write to memory that just does not exist, or it tries to write to some other piece of write protected memory, or until it corrupts your code (in memory).