Stack exhaustion doesn't seem to be due to be the root cause. A simple recursive function doesn't crash the interpreter in Python 3.6.

>>> def rec(): rec()
>>> rec()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in rec
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in rec
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in rec
  [Previous line repeated 995 more times]
RecursionError: maximum recursion depth exceeded