• orhtej2@eviltoast.orgOP
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      15 hours ago

      Forkbomb kills the entire system so not really.

      With the stack overflow the runtime will gracefully terminate the program.

    • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      No.

      A stack overflow is a symptom, not the illness. A fork bomb is an illness.

      Software coming from the mathematical point of view, assummes it has infinite resources. However, a real computer has many resources that are finite.

      CPU time is finite. Memory amount is finite. There is a finite number of network ports. And so on.

      A stack overflow just means: “you have run out of this resource called ‘the stack’”. The stack is a region of the memory. Each thread of each process has 1 stack, and it is not infinite in size. This program will cause a stack overflow because it is infinitely recursive, and each function call will consume a bit of the stack.

      A forkbomb is not the end of a finite resource. A fork bomb is a program that uses “forking” to rapidly consume system resources. A fork bomb might cause a stack overflow. Or an out of memory issue. Slow the computer a lot. Or if the OS has a hard limit for process amount, it might reach that limit.