Why is main method not getting called same no. of times recursively in java every time it is executed?

Question

When I tried to run this program couple of times the final value of i is 11407, 11417, 11400 etc. before displaying stack overflow error. Why is the final value of i not same every time this program is executed?

public class MainRecursive {
    static int i=0;

    public static void main (String arg[])
    {
        i++;
        System.out.println(i);

        main(arg);
    }
}

Answer 1

Try to add System.out.flush(); after printing.

Since the stack size is not changing, i gets to the same value each time you run, but I think println() gets interrupted by the exception before it updates the output at different times - this depends on the console, operating system etc and cannot be deterministic.