Analysis of the maximum number of recursive calls supported by JavaScript_javascript skills

Are you curious about how many recursive calls the JavaScript engine can make?

How many recursive calls

The following function will let you find the answer: (Inspired by Ben Alman's gist)

Three results:

What do these numbers represent? Mr. Aleph pointed out that in V8, the number of recursive calls depends on two quantities: the size of the stack and the size of the stack frame (the local variable that holds the parameters). You can verify this by adding a local variable in computeMaxCallStackSize() - it will return the low value.

Tail call optimization in ECMAScript 6

ES6 has tail call optimization: if the last step in a function is also a function call, it will be "skipped" instead of being called through a sub-function. This means that under ES6 (strict mode), you only need to change the computeMaxCallStackSize function slightly and it can execute forever.