Question

Does a JVM exit when a stack overflow exception occurs in one of the executing threads?

Answer 1

You can try it for yourself using, for example with the following code (a new thread is spawned and started and calls a() which calls itself recursively as to trigger a stack overflow while another thread prints something to the console):

public class SO {

    private static void a() {
        a();
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
    final Thread t = new Thread( new Runnable() {
        public void run() {
            a();
        }
    });
    t.start();
    while ( true ) {
        Thread.sleep( 2000 );
        System.out.println( "I'm still running @ " + System.currentTimeMillis() );
    }
}

You’ll see your stack overflow error:

Exception in thread "Thread-1" java.lang.StackOverflowError

and you’ll also see that the printing thread keeps happily printing along.

Also note that if the EDT thread dies, it is relaunched automagically.