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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).
If a function-local allocation is found to be accessible to another function or thread, the allocation is said to "escape" and cannot be done on the stack. Otherwise, the object may be allocated directly on the stack and released when the function returns, bypassing the heap and associated memory management costs. [22]
It is difficult to compare the two cases directly, as their behavior depends on the situation. For example, in the best case for a garbage collecting system, allocation just increments a pointer, but in the best case for manual heap allocation, the allocator maintains freelists of specific sizes and allocation only requires following a pointer.
In computer programming, a static variable is a variable that has been allocated "statically", meaning that its lifetime (or "extent") is the entire run of the program. This is in contrast to shorter-lived automatic variables, whose storage is stack allocated and deallocated on the call stack; and in contrast to dynamically allocated objects, whose storage is allocated and deallocated in heap ...
A compiler can use the results of escape analysis as a basis for optimizations: [1] Converting heap allocations to stack allocations. [2] If an object is allocated in a subroutine, and a pointer to the object never escapes, the object may be a candidate for stack allocation instead of heap allocation.
The alternatives are manual memory management of non-local variables (explicitly allocating on the heap and freeing when done), or, if using stack allocation, for the language to accept that certain use cases will lead to undefined behaviour, due to dangling pointers to freed automatic variables, as in lambda expressions in C++11 [10] or nested ...
The canonical heap overflow technique overwrites dynamic memory allocation linkage (such as malloc metadata) and uses the resulting pointer exchange to overwrite a program function pointer. For example, on older versions of Linux , two buffers allocated next to each other on the heap could result in the first buffer overwriting the second ...
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for C allocates memory for VLAs with automatic storage duration on the stack. [5] This is the faster and more straightforward option compared to heap-allocation, and is used by most compilers. VLAs can also be allocated on the heap and internally accessed using a pointer to this block.