Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The C programming language manages memory statically, automatically, or dynamically.Static-duration variables are allocated in main memory, usually along with the executable code of the program, and persist for the lifetime of the program; automatic-duration variables are allocated on the stack and come and go as functions are called and return.
The set of values pushed for one function call is termed a "stack frame". A stack frame consists at minimum of a return address. Automatic variables are also allocated on the stack. The stack segment traditionally adjoined the heap segment and they grew towards each other; when the stack pointer met the heap pointer, free memory was exhausted.
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).
This shows the typical layout of a simple computer's program memory with the text, various data, and stack and heap sections. Historically, BSS (from Block Started by Symbol) is a pseudo-operation in UA-SAP (United Aircraft Symbolic Assembly Program), the assembler developed in the mid-1950s for the IBM 704 by Roy Nutt, Walter Ramshaw, and others at United Aircraft Corporation.
The term "segment" comes from the memory segment, which is a historical approach to memory management that has been succeeded by paging.When a program is stored in an object file, the code segment is a part of this file; when the loader places a program into memory so that it may be executed, various memory regions are allocated (in particular, as pages), corresponding to both the segments in ...
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.
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 ...
The break table is stored in the heap that is being compacted, but in an area that is marked as unused. To ensure that compaction will always succeed, the minimum object size in the heap must be larger than or the same size as a break table record. As compaction progresses, relocated objects are copied towards the bottom of the heap.