SWI-Prolog (like many other Prolog systems) uses C recursive functions to traverse terms. This is problematic because

1. There is no good portable way to catch stack overflow and recover the status before traversing the term started.
2. The C-stack is often quite limited in size. Even if this is not the case, each thread needs to reserve the stack in the virtual address space. This is painful for many-threaded applications on 32-bit hardware.

The table below lists Prolog predicates whose C implementation contains recursive functions operating on terms. There are two classes of functions.

• The functions in bold describe fully recursive C-functions
• The other functions are functions that perform Last Argument Optimization (LAO): they do not create a new stack frame for processing the last argument. This implies they pose no limit on structures nested on the last argument. Lists is the common example of such terms.

This table is created using the tools in src/tools in the source distribution. These tools require a recent Linux system and GCC.

Last updated for version: V5.11.22-78-g19d83e4