The maximum call stack size

Are you curious how many recursive calls you can make on your JavaScript engine?

How many recursive calls?

The following function lets you find out (inspired by a gist by Ben Alman).

    function computeMaxCallStackSize() {
        try {
            return 1 + computeMaxCallStackSize();
        } catch (e) {
            // Call stack overflow
            return 1;
        }
    }

Three results:

• Node.js: 11034


• Firefox: 50994


• Chrome: 10402

What does this number mean? Mr. Aleph pointed out to me that on V8, the number of recursive calls you can make depends on two quantities: the size of the stack and the size of the stack frame (holding parameters and local variables). You can verify the latter by adding local variables to computeMaxCallStackSize() – it’ll return a lower number.

Tail call optimization in ECMAScript 6

ECMAScript 6 will have tail call optimization: If a function call is the last action in a function, it is handled via a “jump”, not via a “subroutine call”. That means that, if you slightly rewrote computeMaxCallStackSize(), it would run forever under ECMAScript 6 (in strict mode):

    function computeMaxCallStackSize(size) {
        size = size || 1;
        return computeMaxCallStackSize(size + 1);
    }