Python assumes that the system default thread stack size is big enough for python, except for OSX and FreeBSD where stack size is explicitly set. With musl libc the system thread stack size is only 80k, which leads to hard crash before `sys.getrecursionlimit()` is hit.

See: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/Python/thread_pthread.h#L22


Testcase:

import threading
import sys

def f(n=0):
    try:
        print(n)
        f(n+1)
    except Exception:
        print("we hit recursion limit")
        sys.exit(0)

t = threading.Thread(target=f)
t.start()


This can be pasted into:

  docker run --rm -it python:2.7-alpine
  docker run --rm -it python:3.6-alpine