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javalanguage-agnosticprogramming-languagesstack

Primary reasons why programming language runtimes use stacks?

Many programming language runtime environments use stacks as their primary storage structure (e.g. see JVM bytecode to runtime example).

Quickly recalling I see following advantages:

  • Simple structure (pop/push), trivial to implement
  • Most processors are anyway optimized for stack operations, so it is very fast
  • Less problems with memory fragmentation, it is always about moving memory-pointer up and down for allocation and freeing complete blocks of memory by resetting the pointer to the last entry offset.

Is the list complete or did I miss something? Are there programming language runtime environments which are not using stacks for storage at all?

Solution

  • Just decided to include a link to one of the most insightful developers alive (and active), the architect of hotspot JVM:

    When you compare the speed & power of a CPU executing bytecodes, you'll see lots of hardware complexity around the basic execution issues (I'm skipping on lots of obvious examples, but here's one: the stack layout sucks for wide-issue because of direct stack dependencies).

    http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff-click/2010-04-21-un-bear-able