Question

I have written the following method to read data from a stream in general. On my computer it’s gonna be a MemoryStream, and in the real world, it’s gonna be a network stream.

    public async void ReadAsync()
    {
        byte[] data = new byte[1024];
        int numBytesRead = await _stream.ReadAsync(data, 0, 1024);

        // Process data ...

        // Read again.
        ReadAsync();
    }

The idea here is that data gets processed in the callback, and the callback should then spawn a new reader-thread (and kill the old).
This does not happen however. I get a StackOverflowException.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You’ve got a never-ending recursion.

You’re calling ReadAsync() forever and never return from the method (hence breaking the infinite recursion).

A possible solution is:

public async void ReadAsync()
{
    byte[] data = new byte[1024];
    int numBytesRead = await _stream.ReadAsync(data, 0, 1024);

    // Process data ...

    // Read again.
    if(numBytesRead > 0)
    {
        ReadAsync();
    }
}

To understand recursion better, check this.