“Stack is created in the top-level-address and the heap at the low-level-address” Please elobarate this This is a myth. It may have a basis in historical truth. It might sometimes resonate with things you see in real life. But it is not literally true. It’s easy enough to explore, though: #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> void … Read more
Is accessing data in the heap faster than from the stack? Not inherently… on every architecture I’ve ever worked on, all the process “memory” can be expected to operate at the same set of speeds, based on which level of CPU cache / RAM / swap file is holding the current data, and any hardware-level … Read more
The stack is normally limited by a resource limit. You can see what the default settings are on your installation using ulimit -a: stack size (kbytes, -s) 8192 (this shows that mine is 8MB, which is huge). If you remove or increase that limit, you still won’t be able to use all the RAM in … Read more
Modern operating systems do not give you direct access to hardware RAM and instead abstract it in so called virtual memory, which it maps to RAM on demand. Each process is usually given its own private copy of the complete address space. This allows the OS to move a process’ memory around in RAM at … Read more
An array stores its elements in contiguous memory locations. If You created the array locally it will be on stack. Where the elements are stored depends on the storage specification. For Example: An array declared globally or statically would have different storage specification from an array declared locally. Technically, the where part is implementation defined … Read more
The string literal will be allocated in data segment. The pointer to it, a, will be allocated on the stack. Your code will eventually get transformed by the compiler into something like this: #include <stdio.h> const static char literal_constant_34562[7] = {‘t’, ‘e’, ‘s’, ‘a’, ‘j’, ‘a’, ‘\0’}; int main() { char *a; a = &literal_constant_34562[0]; … Read more
It’s worth noting that the words “stack” and “heap” do not appear anywhere in the language spec. Your question is worded with “…is declared on the stack,” and “…declared on the heap,” but note that Go declaration syntax says nothing about stack or heap. That technically makes the answer to all of your questions implementation … Read more
Others have already given good answers about the heap, so I’ll leave that alone. Some implementations (e.g., on IBM mainframes) don’t use a stack as most people would think of it, for the simple reason that the hardware doesn’t support it. Instead, when you call a function, an activation record (i.e., space for the locals, … Read more
There are a few reasons: The main one is that with heap allocation, you have the most flexible control over the object’s lifetime (from malloc/calloc to free); Stack space is typically a more limited resource than heap space, at least in default configurations; A failure to allocate heap space can be handled gracefully, whereas running … Read more