The stack differs in many ways compared to the heap. Here are some of the unique properties of the stack:
- The stack is a contiguous memory block.
- It has a fixed maximum size. If a program exceeds the maximum stack size, the program will crash.
- The stack memory never becomes fragmented.
- Allocating memory from the stack is always fast.
- Each thread in a program has its own stack.
The code examples that follow in this section will examine some of these properties. Let's start with allocations and deallocations to get a feel for how the stack is used in a program.
We can easily find out in which direction the stack grows by inspecting the address of stack-allocated data. The following example code demonstrates how the stack grows ...
