Fugato

IE6 started to throw this JScript error in my face, “Stack overflow in line: 0″, in a mildly involved bundle of one-off Javascript I was cobbling together.

It was a series of calculations trickling down from an initial textbox change through cascading onchange events and homemade callbacks, and it worked, that’s not the problem — but once it was done this error message popped up each time. It didn’t happen during the calculations, it happened outside my code. I did not have any infinite recursion anywhere. Firefox showed no problems.

When I disabled the deepest part of the calculations (where the execution stack went deepest), this didn’t occur at the end. I could pinpoint just where I had to stop such that this wouldn’t happen at the end. This was around 10 stack frames, if I recall correctly.

Googling turned up nothing in the way of an explanation or a fix.

I finally worked around it by wrapping one call in setTimeout(function() { call(); }, 0); to put the rest of the execution on a fresh stack.

That worked around the spurious error dialog … but I still don’t know what was going wrong. Can’t stand that!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 2nd, 2006 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Microsoft, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.