Compilers: Principles and Practice by Pearson

452 Appendix C

C.1.4 Logical View of Process Memory

Roughly speaking, a process is a running program. When

a process is active, its memory layout is shown in Fig. C.4.

Compare the regions with those given in Fig. C.3.

C.1.5 Actual Process Memory

Actual process memory has one more component – free

memory or heap area. This is the memory area from

which portions are allocated when library function calls

like malloc() are executed. Because these memory area

allocation requests are received by the system not at compile

time, but at execution time, the compiler cannot pre-assign the

memory as in the case of initialized or uninitialized data areas. ...