StackOverflow2013

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copied!<p>The stack is a portion of memory that can be manipulated via several key assembly language instructions, such as 'pop' (remove and return a value from the stack) and 'push' (push a value to the stack), but also call (call a subroutine - this pushes the address to return to the stack) and return (return from a subroutine - this pops the address off of the stack and jumps to it). It's the region of memory below the stack pointer register, which can be set as needed. The stack is also used for passing arguments to subroutines, and also for preserving the values in registers before calling subroutines.</p> <p>The heap is a portion of memory that is given to an application by the operating system, typically through a syscall like malloc. On modern OSes this memory is a set of pages that only the calling process has access to.</p> <p>The size of the stack is determined at runtime, and generally does not grow after the program launches. In a C program, the stack needs to be large enough to hold every variable declared within each function. The heap will grow dynamically as needed, but the OS is ultimately making the call (it will often grow the heap by more than the value requested by malloc, so that at least some future mallocs won't need to go back to the kernel to get more memory. This behavior is often customizable)</p> <p>Because you've allocated the stack before launching the program, you never need to malloc before you can use the stack, so that's a slight advantage there. In practice, it's very hard to predict what will be fast and what will be slow in modern operating systems that have virtual memory subsystems, because how the pages are implemented and where they are stored is an implementation detail. </p>

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