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In computer programming, a static variable is a variable that has been allocated "statically", meaning that its lifetime (or "extent") is the entire run of the program. This is in contrast to shorter-lived automatic variables, whose storage is stack allocated and deallocated on the call stack; and in contrast to dynamically allocated objects, whose storage is allocated and deallocated in heap ...
static is a reserved word in many programming languages to modify a declaration. The effect of the keyword varies depending on the details of the specific programming language, most commonly used to modify the lifetime (as a static variable) and visibility (depending on linkage), or to specify a class member instead of an instance member in classes.
This shows the typical layout of a simple computer's program memory with the text, various data, and stack and heap sections. The data segment contains initialized static variables, i.e. global variables and local static variables which have a defined value and can be modified. Examples in C include:
The different types of variables are static, stack-dynamic, explicit heap-dynamic, and implicit heap-dynamic. A static variable is also known as global variable, it is bound to a memory cell before execution begins and remains to the same memory cell until termination. A typical example is the static variables in C and C++.
Many static type systems, such as those of C and Java, require type declarations: the programmer must explicitly associate each variable with a specific type. Others, such as Haskell's, perform type inference : the compiler draws conclusions about the types of variables based on how programmers use those variables.
In computer programming, thread-local storage (TLS) is a memory management method that uses static or global memory local to a thread. The concept allows storage of data that appears to be global in a system with separate threads. Many systems impose restrictions on the size of the thread-local memory block, in fact often rather tight limits.
The term local variable is usually synonymous with automatic variable, since these are the same thing in many programming languages, but local is more general – most local variables are automatic local variables, but static local variables also exist, notably in C. For a static local variable, the allocation is static (the lifetime is the ...
The static keyword (static and extern are mutually exclusive), applied to the definition of an external variable, changes this a bit: the variable can only be accessed by the functions in the same module where it was defined. But it is possible for a function in the same module to pass a reference (pointer) of the variable to another function ...