[jrochkind1]

I mean, it'd be a pathological 202 byte JSON, but yeah (I guess it could be a DOS attack of some kind, actually, hmm...)

Ruby is a good example, because the `oj` gem, on presumably the same system, is listed as "infinite." Obviously not truly "infinite", eventually it'll run out of RAM -- but this shows it is _not_ an issue of machine resources really.

As the OP notes, it's because if you implement using recursion, you'll run out of stack in most languages (now let's start talking about tail call optimization...), but this isn't the only implementation choice, you _can_ implement to not have this limitation, and probably should.

[biggestdecision]

Anywhere you accept JSON from untrusted users, you should be catching parse errors anyway.

[nwellnhof]

Tail call optimization wouldn't help with parsing JSON.

[imtringued]

Usually the solution is to create an array on the heap and manage the stack yourself.