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Questions tagged [call-stack]

For questions relating to the call stack, a data structure used to keep track of the active function calls during program execution.

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25 votes
3 answers
3k views

What are the benefits of stackful vs. stackless coroutines?

Many languages that use async nowadays are implemented via stackless coroutines. That is, in a language like Python or Javascript, when you ...
Silvio Mayolo's user avatar
13 votes
0 answers
298 views

Why were OS/360 PL/I procedure calls so expensive?

In Guy Steele’s famous paper Debunking the “expensive procedure call” myth or, procedure call implementations considered harmful or, LAMBDA: The Ultimate GOTO, he describes the poor performance of ...
Alexis King's user avatar
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8 votes
3 answers
370 views

Pros and cons of reifying the stack in an interpreter

When implementing an interpreter, there is a choice between implementing function calls either by just recursively evaluating the function body in a different evaluation context ─ essentially ...
kaya3's user avatar
  • 20.8k
6 votes
4 answers
836 views

How do interpreters avoid stack buffer overflow-related undefined behavior and exploits?

Most interpreters (including those for bytecode-based languages like Java) are assumed to be exempt of UB at the low-level. For instance, I would never expect NodeJS or the Hotspot JVM to allow ...
anon's user avatar
  • 223
1 vote
1 answer
255 views

Alternatives for stackless async I/O implementation?

I find it interesting to have stackless asynchronous I/O, e.g. when using an HTTP-client in the code, the call-stack get emptied before handling next "event" (could be unrelated or the ...
Jonas's user avatar
  • 501