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Call stack layout for upward-growing stacks after the DrawSquare subroutine (shown in blue) called DrawLine (shown in green), which is the currently executing routine. A call stack is composed of stack frames (also called activation records or activation frames).
In most compiled programs, this local state is stored on the call stack in a data structure called a stack frame or activation record. This stack frame is pushed, or allocated, as prelude to calling another function, and is popped, or deallocated, when the other function returns to the function that did the call.
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 ...
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);
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.
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).
However, programming languages do not actually operate in this fashion. Generally they use a stack containing local variables and other information for subroutines known as a stack frame or activation record. The compiler writes code to create activation records using the underlying processor's load-store design.
However, for language implementations which store function arguments and local variables on a call stack (which is the default implementation for many languages, at least on systems with a hardware stack, such as the x86), implementing generalized tail-call optimization (including mutual tail recursion) presents an issue: if the size of the ...