WCP: How does your software stack up?
When we link our programs together, the success of the operation reassures us that all our code and our static and global(?!) variables fit into the available memory. But what about the function parameters, the local variables and various other unknowns which go on the stack?
When someone mentions dynamic memory allocation, the worst-casers amongst us – which should be all of us – immediately start ranting against heap allocation and advocating either the somewhat safer use of fixed-size-block pools, or the ostensibly even safer but often design-compromising measure of banning of dynamic allocation altogether. But heaps and pools I’ve covered before on this blog. What we all tend to brush under the carpet is the admission that the implicit use of the stack in all our programming (in C and C++ at least) is also dynamic allocation and deserves much more careful consideration than we tend to give it. Read more…