12 Facts About Call stack

In computer science, a call stack is a stack data structure that stores information about the active subroutines of a computer program.

Call stack is used for several related purposes, but the main reason for having one is to keep track of the point to which each active subroutine should return control when it finishes executing.

Since the call stack is organized as a stack, the caller pushes the return address onto the stack, and the called subroutine, when it finishes, pulls or pops the return address off the call stack and transfers control to that address.

Typical call stack is used for the return address, locals, and parameters.

Stack frame at the top of the Call stack is for the currently executing routine, which can access information within its frame in any order.

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At function return, the stack pointer is instead restored to the frame pointer, the value of the stack pointer just before the function was called.

Each Call stack frame contains a Call stack pointer to the top of the frame immediately below.

In most systems a stack frame has a field to contain the previous value of the frame pointer register, the value it had while the caller was executing.

Usually the call stack manipulation needed at the site of a call to a subroutine is minimal.

The values for the actual arguments are evaluated at the call site, since they are specific to the particular call, and either pushed onto the stack or placed into registers, as determined by the used calling convention.

The more general act of popping one or more frames off the stack to resume execution elsewhere in the program is called stack unwinding and must be performed when non-local control structures are used, such as those used for exception handling.

Common Lisp allows control of what happens when the Call stack is unwound by using the unwind-protect special operator.