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Asked by: Haya Rumel
technology and computing data storage and warehousingWhere is the heap located in a machine's memory map?
Furthermore, where is the heap located in memory?
Stack is used for static memory allocation and Heap for dynamic memory allocation, both stored in the computer's RAM . Variables allocated on the stack are stored directly to the memory and access to this memory is very fast, and it's allocation is dealt with when the program is compiled.
where in memory is the heap located and in which direction does it grow?
The Heap is the segment where dynamic memory allocation usually takes place. This area commonly begins at the end of the BSS segment and grows upwards to higher memory addresses. In C, it's managed by malloc / new , free / delete , which use the brk and sbrk system calls to adjust it's size.
In C, dynamic memory is allocated from the heap using some standard library functions. The two key dynamic memory functions are malloc() and free(). The malloc() function takes a single parameter, which is the size of the requested memory area in bytes. It returns a pointer to the allocated memory.