Today, in the normal course of doing my job, I encountered a situation that caused the JVM to blow up, and, being the friendly and helpful piece of software that it is, it emitted 28,092 lines of stack trace. That’s twenty-eight thousand lines, totalling 2.2 megabytes worth. But, thankfully, the JVM doesn’t do tail-call elimination, so none of those super useful stack frames could possibly be elided. Software wins again.