Explain the concept of a stack frame in a nutshell

by

A stack frame is a frame of data that gets pushed onto the stack. In the case of a call stack, a stack frame would represent a function call and its argument data.

If I remember correctly, the function return address is pushed onto the stack first, then the arguments and space for local variables. Together, they make the “frame,” although this is likely architecture-dependent. The processor knows how many bytes are in each frame and moves the stack pointer accordingly as frames are pushed and popped off the stack.

EDIT:

There is a big difference between higher-level call stacks and the processor’s call stack.

When we talk about a processor’s call stack, we are talking about working with addresses and values at the byte/word level in assembly or machine code. There are “call stacks” when talking about higher-level languages, but they are a debugging/runtime tool managed by the runtime environment so that you can log what went wrong with your program (at a high level). At this level, things like line numbers and method and class names are often known. By the time the processor gets the code, it has absolutely no concept of these things.

More Related Contents:

  1. How do you find out the caller function in JavaScript?
  2. Maximum call stack size exceeded error
  3. Why doesn’t my program crash when I write past the end of an array?
  4. print call stack in C or C++
  5. What is the direction of stack growth in most modern systems?
  6. What causes a java.lang.StackOverflowError
  7. How to get the name of the calling class in Java?
  8. Array to pointer decay and passing multidimensional arrays to functions
  9. Node.js – Maximum call stack size exceeded
  10. Are stack variables aligned by the GCC __attribute__((aligned(x)))?
  11. How exactly does the callstack work?
  12. What are CFI directives in Gnu Assembler (GAS) used for?
  13. How does the stack work in assembly language?
  14. How do I print functions as they are called?
  15. Does java have any mechanism for a VM to trace method calls on itself, without using javaagent, etc?
  16. How can I increase the maximum call stack size in Node.js
  17. Why does the Mac ABI require 16-byte stack alignment for x86-32?
  18. “RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded” Why?
  19. Is there any way to set a breakpoint in gdb that is conditional on the call stack?
  20. The call stack does not say “where you came from”, but “where you are going next”?
  21. Why does gcc use movl instead of push to pass function args?
  22. Why does the stack address grow towards decreasing memory addresses?
  23. Stack overflow exception in C# setter
  24. What is the purpose of the _chkstk() function?
  25. What are the ESP and the EBP registers?
  26. How can I get a call stack listing in Perl?
  27. List of all function calls made in an application
  28. Is it possible to retrieve the call stack programmatically in VB6?

Leave a Comment