Stack and Heap
In programming or memory management, we often talk about placing our data either on stack or heap. Here are some key differences between them:
- placing data on the stack is faster than doing so on the heap
- stack is local to the currently executing function, while the heap is “global”
- memory allocated on the heap is linked to via a pointer/reference placed on the stack. This pointer/reference can then be cloned or moved around between different functions.
Various programming languages often allow us to choose where to store the data. The usual default is to store smaller pieces of data on the stack and put larger amounts of data on the heap. The stack’s size is pretty small compared to the heap.
Stack Machine
“Stack” is not just a region of memory. This word sometimes also refers to the architecture of a Stack Machine. CPUs (and VMs) have built-in support for stacks, meaning that their instruction sets include special instructions for manipulating the stack (i.e., push, pop). It is a convenience that compilers use for implementing function calls. Each function call creates a stack frame. Such a frame contains all the data local to a given function execution:
- arguments passed into the function
- return value
- return address
Anytime some function is called, a new stack frame is created. Anytime a function returns, its stack frame is gone (or rather, the stack pointer gets decremented). Too many recursive calls will cause a stack overflow since the stack has some predefined size.
Stack size
The size of the stack is defined during compilation, or at runtime, so the value will vary depending on what toolchain was used to build the program, and what the execution environment (i.e., the OS) is.
Heap
We place data on the heap when:
- it’s big (the stack could be too small to hold it)
- it’s going to be used by multiple functions (placing it on the stack would incur copying it to new stack frames lots of times)
Memory on the heap needs to be allocated. There are various strategies of how to allocate data on the heap, every program can have its way of doing that. Allocators take care of things such as memory defragmentation.