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A comment on Understanding Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection. Parent comment

Re:Understanding Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection by nayuki on Friday March 27, 2020 @10:00AM (#22702867)
The classical reason why stacks grow downward is because heaps grow upward. This arrangement maximizes the usefulness of the virtual address space in a single-threaded process.
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Re:Understanding Hardware-Enforced Stack Protection by Taniwha on Saturday March 28, 2020 @12:25AM (#22709214)
well stacks typically grew downwards even before there were heaps (but not always - Burroughs large systems for example)

Heaps of course can grow downwards

With modern 64-bit address spaces actual running out of space is not an issue (especially since we're dynamically moving around code, heaps and stacks for security reasons anyway)

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