Comment by Joker_vD
6 years ago
To be fair, that's not exactly a horrible perversion, relying on the existence of memory protection. Hell, that's precisely how stack grows dynamically on Windows: there is a guard page at the bottom, when it's touched, the kernel allocates it and marks the page below it as the new guard page. The downside is that stack allocations larger than 4 K have to manually probe memory to trigger this behaviour, that's what _stkchk from CRT does.
Most of such low-level hacks are nowadays reserved exclusively for runtime implementations, probably for the better.
The early 68k machines had memory protection, they just couldn't resume the instruction that triggered it, it wasn't until the 68010 that this was fixed. You can also see evidence of this in early 68k C compilers, the function entry code would have a dummy instruction to probe the end of the area on the stack that was needed to hold any local variables.
Nit, but it's _chkstk.