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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 addition, the stack pointer must always be 4-byte aligned, and must always be 8-byte aligned at a function call with a public interface. [3] This calling convention causes a "typical" ARM subroutine to: In the prologue, push r4 to r11 to the stack, and push the return address in r14 to the stack (this can be done with a single STM instruction);
How parameters are passed (pushed on the stack, placed in registers, or a mix of both) Which registers the called function must preserve for the caller (also known as: callee-saved registers or non-volatile registers) How the task of preparing the stack for, and restoring after, a function call is divided between the caller and the callee
A typical call stack, storing local data and call information for multiple levels of procedure calls. This stack grows downward from its origin. The stack pointer points to the current topmost datum on the stack. A push operation decrements the pointer and copies the data to the stack; a pop operation copies data from the stack and then ...
One disadvantage of the call stack mechanism is the increased cost of a procedure call and its matching return. [ clarification needed ] The extra cost includes incrementing and decrementing the stack pointer (and, in some architectures, checking for stack overflow ), and accessing the local variables and parameters by frame-relative addresses ...
The stack segment register (SS) is usually used to store information about the memory segment that stores the call stack of currently executed program. SP points to current stack top. By default, the stack grows downward in memory, so newer values are placed at lower memory addresses. To save a value to the stack, the PUSH instruction
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 easily holds more than two inputs or more than one result, so a rich set of operations can be computed. In stack machine code (sometimes called p-code), instructions will frequently have only an opcode commanding an operation, with no additional fields identifying a constant, register or memory cell, known as a zero address format. [1]