We described the stack as a manager of variables with automatic storage duration. The word automatic suggests that programmers shouldn't care about the actual memory allocation and deallocation. Automatic storage duration could be achieved only if the size of data or a collection of the data is known beforehand. This way, the compiler is aware of the number and type of function arguments and local variables. At this point, it seems more than fine, but programs tend to work with dynamic data— data of an unknown size. We will study dynamic memory management in detail in Chapter 5, Memory Management and Smart Pointers; for now, let's look at a simplified diagram of memory segments and find out what the heap is used for:
The program ...
