Re: Mandatory stack check (was: Changing discriminants...)

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Ken said

"Interesting. Does stack checking typically introduce an extra branch in the
object code? If so, then someone with a requirement to test every object-code
branch point would have to introduce a test to force a stack overflow for each
affected code segment (including elaboration), or have to justify why the
overflow check didn't need to be tested. That could be a little annoying..."

Right, that would be a real disadvantage of the branch based approach. Our
approach is to map out a page at the end of the stack and catch the
reference (there are quite a few fine points to get this to work right, and
it tends to be quite taget dependent).

I would have thought that anyone with a requirement to test every object-code
branch point would also include requirements to verify that the stack cannot
overflow, but perhaps not!