The processor does not know where your code ends. It faithfully executes one instruction after another until execution is redirected elsewhere (e.g. by a jump, call, interrupt, system call, or similar). If your code ends without jumping elsewhere, the processor continues executing whatever is in memory after your code. It is fairly unpredictable what exactly happens, but eventually, your code typically crashes because it tries to execute an invalid instruction or tries to access memory that it is not allowed to access. If neither happens and no jump occurs, eventually the processor tries to execute unmapped memory or memory that is marked as “not executable” as code, causing a segmentation violation. On Linux, this raises a SIGSEGV or SIGBUS. When unhandled, these terminate your process and optionally produce core dumps.
