Question

I am trying to write a program for selection sort of the elements an array in C++ (VS2010) using recursion. The program works without any issues for for smaller arrays where the size of the array is less than 10 when I increase the size of the array to 10000 I am facing stackoverflow exception. How do I go about resolving this?

Thank you for the answers so far. My idea is not to sort the array but to sort a large array using recursion and the hit a stackoverflow exception. My main idea behind this exercise is to learn ways to resolve the stackoverflow exception rather than sorting the array.

selectionSortRecursive(int a[], int startindex, int endindex)
{
    if (startindex<endindex)
    {
        int s = startindex;
        for (int index=startindex+1;index<endindex;index++)
        {
            if (a[s]>a[index])
                s=index;
        }
        if (s>startindex)
        {
            a[s]=a[startindex]+a[s];
            a[startindex]=a[s]-a[startindex];
            a[s]=a[s]-a[startindex];
        }
        selectionSortRecursive(a, startindex+1, endindex);
    }

}

Answer 1

Either increase the size of the stack (which can be done with the STACK linker option) or — and this is a much better option — improve or replace your algorithm. It sounds like a recursive algorithm may not be suitable for the kind of data you need to process, but maybe you can improve things by using fewer local variables and/or parameters in each method invocation, to make the stack frames smaller.