Recursions not causing StackOverflow

[viebel]

I was positively surprised to discover that this code was not causing a stack overflow

(define (factorial-rec n)
  (if (= n 1)
      1
      (* n (factorial-rec (- n 1)))))

(factorial-rec 10000)

How could it be?

[amirouche]

I think biwascheme implement a tranpoline.

[yhara]

BiwaScheme stack is a JavaScript Array and dynamically extended while recursion goes deeper.

[viebel]

Oh. Nice!

Is it required by Scheme standard to prevent stack overflow in deep recursions?

[yhara]

Is it required by Scheme standard to prevent stack overflow in deep recursions?

The answer is yes, if the function is "tail-recursive".

The requirement is called TCO(tail-call optimization). A Scheme implementation must not grow stack frame for tail calls.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/310974/what-is-tail-call-optimization

However your factorial-rec is not tail-recursive, so it is implementation dependent that how big n could be.