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The stack is often used to store variables of fixed length local to the currently active functions. Programmers may further choose to explicitly use the stack to store local data of variable length. If a region of memory lies on the thread's stack, that memory is said to have been allocated on the stack, i.e. stack-based memory allocation (SBMA).
The stack segment contains the call stack, a LIFO structure, typically located in the higher parts of memory. A "stack pointer" register tracks the top of the stack; it is adjusted each time a value is "pushed" onto the stack. The set of values pushed for one function call is termed a "stack frame". A stack frame consists at minimum of a return ...
A stack is usually represented in computers by a block of memory cells, with the "bottom" at a fixed location, and the stack pointer holding the address of the current "top" cell in the stack. The "top" and "bottom" nomenclature is used irrespective of whether the stack actually grows towards higher memory addresses.
In computing, a stack trace (also called stack backtrace [1] or stack traceback [2]) is a report of the active stack frames at a certain point in time during the execution of a program. When a program is run, memory is often dynamically allocated in two places: the stack and the heap. Memory is continuously allocated on a stack but not on a ...
Typical Java interpreters do not buffer the top-of-stack this way, however, because the program and stack have a mix of short and wide data values. If the hardwired stack machine has 2 or more top-stack registers, or a register file, then all memory access is avoided in this example and there is only 1 data cache cycle.
This type of stack is also known as an execution stack, program stack, control stack, run-time stack, or machine stack, and is often shortened to simply the "stack". Although maintenance of the call stack is important for the proper functioning of most software , the details are normally hidden and automatic in high-level programming languages .
In the Pthreads API, memory local to a thread is designated with the term Thread-specific data. The functions pthread_key_create and pthread_key_delete are used respectively to create and delete a key for thread-specific data. The type of the key is explicitly left opaque and is referred to as pthread_key_t. This key can be seen by all threads.
In terms of throughput, tracing by its nature requires some implicit runtime overhead, though in some cases the amortized cost can be extremely low, in some cases even lower than one instruction per allocation or collection, outperforming stack allocation. [7] Manual memory management requires overhead due to explicit freeing of memory, and ...