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In computer science, computer engineering and programming language implementations, a stack machine is a computer processor or a virtual machine in which the primary interaction is moving short-lived temporary values to and from a push down stack. In the case of a hardware processor, a hardware stack is used.
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).
Newer processors contain a dedicated stack engine to optimize stack operations. Pentium M was the first x86 processor to introduce a stack engine. In its implementation, the stack pointer is split among two registers: ESP O , which is a 32-bit register, and ESP d , an 8-bit delta value that is updated directly by stack operations.
A stack hardware optimization is the provision of D (or "display") registers. These are registers that point to the start of each called stack frame. These registers are updated automatically as procedures are entered and exited and are not accessible by any software other than the MCP.
Similarly to a stack of plates, adding or removing is only practical at the top. Simple representation of a stack runtime with push and pop operations. In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements with two main operations: Push, which adds an element to the collection, and
In computer science, a call stack is a stack data structure that stores information about the active subroutines of a computer program.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".
Minimal instruction set computer (MISC) is a central processing unit (CPU) architecture, usually in the form of a microprocessor, with a very small number of basic operations and corresponding opcodes, together forming an instruction set. Such sets are commonly stack-based rather than register-based to reduce the size of operand specifiers.
In computing, the red zone is a fixed-size area in a function's stack frame below (for a push-down stack) the current stack pointer that is reserved and safe to use. It is most commonly used in leaf functions (functions that don't call other functions) for allocating additional stack memory, without moving the stack pointer, which saves an instruction.