this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
579 points (97.5% liked)
Programmer Humor
20039 readers
1745 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Haven't heard of the stack address thing, anyone got a TLDR on the topic?
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/386194/why-do-we-still-grow-the-stack-backwards
TL;DR: For historical reasons stacks growing down is defined in hardware on some CPUs (notably x86). On other CPUs like some ARM chips for example you can technically choose which direction stacks go but not conforming to the historical standard is the choice of a madman.
Pretty sure that it’s something a long the lines of “stack begins high, grows down, while heap behind low grows high” when they meet, it’s a stack overflow
They don't have to meet, the max stack size is defined at compile time
Dynamic stacks are pretty common in the most popular scripting languages, but considered bad practice from folks who use systems languages