JavaScript Rules

Fellow Yahoo! Nicholas Zakas has blogged about some browsers limitations and recently ran some tests in order to check browsers call stack sizes.

Not surprisingly, different browsers have different call stack sizes. Also not surprisingly, the method that they use to determine the call stack varies as well. The various call stack sizes I could measure are (give or take, might be off by 1 or 2):

• Internet Explorer 7: 1,789

• Firefox 3: 3,000

• Chrome 1: 21,837

• Opera 9.62: 10,000

• Safari 3.2: 500 In each case, the browser will end up stopping your code and (hopefully) display a message about the issue:

• Internet Explorer 7: “Stack overflow at line x”

• Firefox 3: “Too much recursion”

• Chrome 1: n/a

• Opera 9.62: “Abort (control stack overflow)”

• Safari 3.2: “RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded.”

We ran some tests ourselves in order to get the call stack sizes on other browsers/hosts/OSs using this simple code:

var i = 0;
 
function recurse () {
    i++;
    recurse();
}
 
try {
    recurse();
} catch (ex) {
    alert('i = ' + i + '\nerror: ' + ex);
}

And got some interesting numbers/errors results:

on Ubuntu 8.04:
stack sizes

• Firefox 3.0.10: 3,000
• Chromium 2.0.174.0~svn20090412r13572: 21,828
• Rhino 1.4r2: 338
• SpiderMonkey 1.7.0: 1,000

errors

• Firefox 3.0.10: InternalError: too much recursion
• Chromium 2.0.174.0~svn20090412r13572: RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded
• Rhino 1.4r2: js: exception from uncaught JavaScript throw: java.lang.StackOverflowError
• SpiderMonkey 1.7.0: InternalError: too much recursion

on Windows XP SP3:
stack sizes

• Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.5512 SP3: 2,541
• Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13: 2,555
• Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18702: 3,076
• Firefox 2.0.0.20: 1,000
• Firefox 3.0.10: 3,000
• Firefox 3.5 Beta 4: 3,000
• Chrome 2.0.172.31: 21,838
• Safari 4 Public Beta (528.16): 43,688
• Opera 9.64: n/a

errors

• Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.5512 SP3: Error: Out of stack space
• Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13: Error: Out of stack space
• Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18702: Error: Out of stack space
• Firefox 2.0.0.20: InternalError: too much recursion
• Firefox 3.0.10: InternalError: too much recursion
• Firefox 3.5 Beta 4: InternalError: too much recursion
• Chrome 2.0.172.31: name: RangeError, type: stack_overflow, message: Maximum call stack size exceeded
• Safari 4 Public Beta (528.16): RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded
• Opera 9.64: Abort (control stack overflow). Script terminated.

You can see this code live and running here.