Editing Segmentation fault (section)

=== Stack overflow ===
{{Main|Stack overflow}}
Another example is [[recursion]] without a base case:

<syntaxhighlight lang="c">
int main(void)
{
    return main();
}
</syntaxhighlight>

which causes the [[stack overflow|stack to overflow]] which results in a segmentation fault.<ref>{{Cite web |title=What is the difference between a segmentation fault and a stack overflow? |url=https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2685413/what-is-the-difference-between-a-segmentation-fault-and-a-stack-overflow/2685434#2685434 |access-date=2023-11-11 |website=Stack Overflow |language=en}}</ref>  Infinite recursion may not necessarily result in a stack overflow depending on the language, optimizations performed by the compiler and the exact structure of a code.  In this case, the behavior of unreachable code (the return statement) is undefined, so the compiler can eliminate it and use a [[tail call]] optimization that might result in no stack usage.  Other optimizations could include translating the recursion into iteration, which given the structure of the example function would result in the program running forever, while probably not overflowing its stack.