[eru]

A reliable 'denial-of-service' is better than silently doing the wrong thing.

> If the program is critical then you need to be able to statically prove the full size of the stack, which you can do with C and C++ with the right tools and restrictions.

Only for specific implementations; and neither C nor C++ standard guarantee that your program won't overflow the stack anyway. (Have a look, the standard says nothing about stack overflows, they still occur in practice with supposedly compliant compilers. So it seems that there are no rules about when they can happen.)