How to handle deep recursions that ends with the java.lang.StackOverflowError

Question

i got a programm with realy deep recursions, iam sure it has no endless loop. But after short time (1s) i get

java.lang.StackOverflowError

is there a possibility to increase the time that he trys to end the programm? I would like to run it a few hours if possible ;-)

Answer 1

To further the comments about reducing recursion/changing to an iterative pattern, and example may be useful. If we take the factorial function as an example, it can be written recursively (and often is) like this:

int recurse(int n){
    if(n = 0) return 1;
    else return n*recurse(n-1);
}

however, it could be done iteratively (and therefore avoid producing stack overflows for large n) like this

int iterate(int n){

    int ans = 1;
    for(int i = n; i > 0; i--){
        ans *= i;
    }
    return ans;

}

It is probably worth doing something similar to your code to avoid the recursion (which is likely the cause of your Error) as it is (almost?) always possible to make recursion iterative