Re:Ask HN: Who had the crazy idea to make the stack grow down?
by bediger4000 on Saturday September 27, 2025 @08:52PM
(#45400788)
The mostly forgotten HP-PA architecture, and whatever architecture Multics ran on had the stack growing up, and the heap in high memory.
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Re:Ask HN: Who had the crazy idea to make the stack grow down?
by bediger4000 on Saturday September 27, 2025 @09:00PM
(#45400834)
In fact, in "Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation" by Paul Karger and Roger Schell, having a stack growing up is given a lot of credit:
"Third, stacks on the Multics processors grew in the positive direction, rather than the negative direction. This meant that if you actually accomplished a buffer overflow, you would be overwriting unused stack frames, rather than your own return pointer, making exploitation much more difficult."