Which is faster: Stack allocation or Heap allocation

Stack allocation is much faster since all it really does is move the stack pointer. Using memory pools, you can get comparable performance out of heap allocation, but that comes with a slight added complexity and its own headaches.

Also, stack vs. heap is not only a performance consideration; it also tells you a lot about the expected lifetime of objects.

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Stack is much faster. It literally only uses a single instruction on most architectures, in most cases, e.g. on x86:

sub esp, 0x10

(That moves the stack pointer down by 0x10 bytes and thereby "allocates" those bytes for use by a variable.)

Of course, the stack's size is very, very finite, as you will quickly find out if you overuse stack allocation or try to do recursion :-)

Also, there's little reason to optimize the performance of code that doesn't verifiably need it, such as demonstrated by profiling. "Premature optimization" often causes more problems than it's worth.

My rule of thumb: if I know I'm going to need some data at compile-time, and it's under a few hundred bytes in size, I stack-allocate it. Otherwise I heap-allocate it.

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Honestly, it's trivial to write a program to compare the performance:

#include <ctime>
#include <iostream>

namespace {
    class empty { }; // even empty classes take up 1 byte of space, minimum
}

int main()
{
    std::clock_t start = std::clock();
    for (int i = 0; i < 100000; ++i)
        empty e;
    std::clock_t duration = std::clock() - start;
    std::cout << "stack allocation took " << duration << " clock ticks\n";
    start = std::clock();
    for (int i = 0; i < 100000; ++i) {
        empty* e = new empty;
        delete e;
    };
    duration = std::clock() - start;
    std::cout << "heap allocation took " << duration << " clock ticks\n";
}

It's said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Apparently optimizing compilers are the hobgoblins of many programmers' minds. This discussion used to be at the bottom of the answer, but people apparently can't be bothered to read that far, so I'm moving it up here to avoid getting questions that I've already answered.

An optimizing compiler may notice that this code does nothing, and may optimize it all away. It is the optimizer's job to do stuff like that, and fighting the optimizer is a fool's errand.

I would recommend compiling this code with optimization turned off because there is no good way to fool every optimizer currently in use or that will be in use in the future.

Anybody who turns the optimizer on and then complains about fighting it should be subject to public ridicule.

If I cared about nanosecond precision I wouldn't use std::clock(). If I wanted to publish the results as a doctoral thesis I would make a bigger deal about this, and I would probably compare GCC, Tendra/Ten15, LLVM, Watcom, Borland, Visual C++, Digital Mars, ICC and other compilers. As it is, heap allocation takes hundreds of times longer than stack allocation, and I don't see anything useful about investigating the question any further.

The optimizer has a mission to get rid of the code I'm testing. I don't see any reason to tell the optimizer to run and then try to fool the optimizer into not actually optimizing. But if I saw value in doing that, I would do one or more of the following:

Add a data member to empty, and access that data member in the loop; but if I only ever read from the data member the optimizer can do constant folding and remove the loop; if I only ever write to the data member, the optimizer may skip all but the very last iteration of the loop. Additionally, the question wasn't "stack allocation and data access vs. heap allocation and data access." Declare e volatile, but volatile is often compiled incorrectly (PDF). Take the address of e inside the loop (and maybe assign it to a variable that is declared extern and defined in another file). But even in this case, the compiler may notice that -- on the stack at least -- e will always be allocated at the same memory address, and then do constant folding like in (1) above. I get all iterations of the loop, but the object is never actually allocated.

Beyond the obvious, this test is flawed in that it measures both allocation and deallocation, and the original question didn't ask about deallocation. Of course variables allocated on the stack are automatically deallocated at the end of their scope, so not calling delete would (1) skew the numbers (stack deallocation is included in the numbers about stack allocation, so it's only fair to measure heap deallocation) and (2) cause a pretty bad memory leak, unless we keep a reference to the new pointer and call delete after we've got our time measurement.

On my machine, using g++ 3.4.4 on Windows, I get "0 clock ticks" for both stack and heap allocation for anything less than 100000 allocations, and even then I get "0 clock ticks" for stack allocation and "15 clock ticks" for heap allocation. When I measure 10,000,000 allocations, stack allocation takes 31 clock ticks and heap allocation takes 1562 clock ticks.

Yes, an optimizing compiler may elide creating the empty objects. If I understand correctly, it may even elide the whole first loop. When I bumped up the iterations to 10,000,000 stack allocation took 31 clock ticks and heap allocation took 1562 clock ticks. I think it's safe to say that without telling g++ to optimize the executable, g++ did not elide the constructors.

In the years since I wrote this, the preference on Stack Overflow has been to post performance from optimized builds. In general, I think this is correct. However, I still think it's silly to ask the compiler to optimize code when you in fact do not want that code optimized. It strikes me as being very similar to paying extra for valet parking, but refusing to hand over the keys. In this particular case, I don't want the optimizer running.

Using a slightly modified version of the benchmark (to address the valid point that the original program didn't allocate something on the stack each time through the loop) and compiling without optimizations but linking to release libraries (to address the valid point that we don't want to include any slowdown caused by linking to debug libraries):

#include <cstdio>
#include <chrono>

namespace {
    void on_stack()
    {
        int i;
    }

    void on_heap()
    {
        int* i = new int;
        delete i;
    }
}

int main()
{
    auto begin = std::chrono::system_clock::now();
    for (int i = 0; i < 1000000000; ++i)
        on_stack();
    auto end = std::chrono::system_clock::now();

    std::printf("on_stack took %f seconds\n", std::chrono::duration<double>(end - begin).count());

    begin = std::chrono::system_clock::now();
    for (int i = 0; i < 1000000000; ++i)
        on_heap();
    end = std::chrono::system_clock::now();

    std::printf("on_heap took %f seconds\n", std::chrono::duration<double>(end - begin).count());
    return 0;
}

displays:

on_stack took 2.070003 seconds
on_heap took 57.980081 seconds

on my system when compiled with the command line cl foo.cc /Od /MT /EHsc.

You may not agree with my approach to getting a non-optimized build. That's fine: feel free modify the benchmark as much as you want. When I turn on optimization, I get:

on_stack took 0.000000 seconds
on_heap took 51.608723 seconds

Not because stack allocation is actually instantaneous but because any half-decent compiler can notice that on_stack doesn't do anything useful and can be optimized away. GCC on my Linux laptop also notices that on_heap doesn't do anything useful, and optimizes it away as well:

on_stack took 0.000003 seconds
on_heap took 0.000002 seconds

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An interesting thing I learned about Stack vs. Heap Allocation on the Xbox 360 Xenon processor, which may also apply to other multicore systems, is that allocating on the Heap causes a Critical Section to be entered to halt all other cores so that the alloc doesn't conflict. Thus, in a tight loop, Stack Allocation was the way to go for fixed sized arrays as it prevented stalls.

This may be another speedup to consider if you're coding for multicore/multiproc, in that your stack allocation will only be viewable by the core running your scoped function, and that will not affect any other cores/CPUs.

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You can write a special heap allocator for specific sizes of objects that is very performant. However, the general heap allocator is not particularly performant.

Also I agree with Torbjörn Gyllebring about the expected lifetime of objects. Good point!

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Concerns Specific to the C++ Language

First of all, there is no so-called "stack" or "heap" allocation mandated by C++. If you are talking about automatic objects in block scopes, they are even not "allocated". (BTW, automatic storage duration in C is definitely NOT the same to "allocated"; the latter is "dynamic" in the C++ parlance.) The dynamically allocated memory is on the free store, not necessarily on "the heap", though the latter is often the (default) implementation.

Although as per the abstract machine semantic rules, automatic objects still occupy memory, a conforming C++ implementation is allowed to ignore this fact when it can prove this does not matter (when it does not change the observable behavior of the program). This permission is granted by the as-if rule in ISO C++, which is also the general clause enabling the usual optimizations (and there is also an almost same rule in ISO C). Besides the as-if rule, ISO C++ also has copy elision rules to allow omission of specific creations of objects. The constructor and destructor calls involved are thereby omitted. As a result, the automatic objects (if any) in these constructors and destructors are also eliminated, compared to naive abstract semantics implied by the source code.

On the other hand, free store allocation is definitely "allocation" by design. Under ISO C++ rules, such an allocation can be achieved by a call of an allocation function. However, since ISO C++14, there is a new (non-as-if) rule to allow merging global allocation function (i.e. ::operator new) calls in specific cases. So parts of dynamic allocation operations can also be no-op like the case of automatic objects.

Allocation functions allocate resources of memory. Objects can be further allocated based on allocation using allocators. For automatic objects, they are directly presented - although the underlying memory can be accessed and be used to provide memory to other objects (by placement new), but this does not make great sense as the free store, because there is no way to move the resources elsewhere.

All other concerns are out of the scope of C++. Nevertheless, they can be still significant.

About Implementations of C++

C++ does not expose reified activation records or some sorts of first-class continuations (e.g. by the famous call/cc), there is no way to directly manipulate the activation record frames - where the implementation need to place the automatic objects to. Once there is no (non-portable) interoperations with the underlying implementation ("native" non-portable code, such as inline assembly code), an omission of the underlying allocation of the frames can be quite trivial. For example, when the called function is inlined, the frames can be effectively merged into others, so there is no way to show what is the "allocation".

However, once interops are respected, things are getting complex. A typical implementation of C++ will expose the ability of interop on ISA (instruction-set architecture) with some calling conventions as the binary boundary shared with the native (ISA-level machine) code. This would be explicitly costly, notably, when maintaining the stack pointer, which is often directly held by an ISA-level register (with probably specific machine instructions to access). The stack pointer indicates the boundary of the top frame of the (currently active) function call. When a function call is entered, a new frame is needed and the stack pointer is added or subtracted (depending on the convention of ISA) by a value not less than the required frame size. The frame is then said allocated when the stack pointer after the operations. Parameters of functions may be passed onto the stack frame as well, depending on the calling convention used for the call. The frame can hold the memory of automatic objects (probably including the parameters) specified by the C++ source code. In the sense of such implementations, these objects are "allocated". When the control exits the function call, the frame is no longer needed, it is usually released by restoring the stack pointer back to the state before the call (saved previously according to the calling convention). This can be viewed as "deallocation". These operations make the activation record effectively a LIFO data structure, so it is often called "the (call) stack". The stack pointer effectively indicates the top position of the stack.

Because most C++ implementations (particularly the ones targeting ISA-level native code and using the assembly language as its immediate output) use similar strategies like this, such a confusing "allocation" scheme is popular. Such allocations (as well as deallocations) do spend machine cycles, and it can be expensive when the (non-optimized) calls occur frequently, even though modern CPU microarchitectures can have complex optimizations implemented by hardware for the common code pattern (like using a stack engine in implementing PUSH/POP instructions).

But anyway, in general, it is true that the cost of stack frame allocation is significantly less than a call to an allocation function operating the free store (unless it is totally optimized away), which itself can have hundreds of (if not millions of :-) operations to maintain the stack pointer and other states. Allocation functions are typically based on API provided by the hosted environment (e.g. runtime provided by the OS). Different to the purpose of holding automatic objects for functions calls, such allocations are general-purpose, so they will not have frame structure like a stack. Traditionally, they allocate space from the pool storage called the heap (or several heaps). Different from the "stack", the concept "heap" here does not indicate the data structure being used; it is derived from early language implementations decades ago. (BTW, the call stack is usually allocated with fixed or user-specified size from the heap by the environment in program/thread startup.) The nature of use cases makes allocations and deallocations from a heap far more complicated (than pushing/poppoing of stack frames), and hardly possible to be directly optimized by hardware.

Effects on Memory Access

The usual stack allocation always puts the new frame on the top, so it has a quite good locality. This is friendly to the cache. OTOH, memory allocated randomly in the free store has no such property. Since ISO C++17, there are pool resource templates provided by <memory_resource>. The direct purpose of such an interface is to allow the results of consecutive allocations being close together in memory. This acknowledges the fact that this strategy is generally good for performance with contemporary implementations, e.g. being friendly to cache in modern architectures. This is about the performance of access rather than allocation, though.

Concurrency

Expectation of concurrent access to memory can have different effects between the stack and heaps. A call stack is usually exclusively owned by one thread of execution in a typical C++ implementation. OTOH, heaps are often shared among the threads in a process. For such heaps, the allocation and deallocation functions have to protect the shared internal administrative data structure from the data race. As a result, heap allocations and deallocations may have additional overhead due to internal synchronization operations.

Space Efficiency

Due to the nature of the use cases and internal data structures, heaps may suffer from internal memory fragmentation, while the stack does not. This does not have direct impacts on the performance of memory allocation, but in a system with virtual memory, low space efficiency may degenerate overall performance of memory access. This is particularly awful when HDD is used as a swap of physical memory. It can cause quite long latency - sometimes billions of cycles.

Limitations of Stack Allocations

Although stack allocations are often superior in performance than heap allocations in reality, it certainly does not mean stack allocations can always replace heap allocations.

First, there is no way to allocate space on the stack with a size specified at runtime in a portable way with ISO C++. There are extensions provided by implementations like alloca and G++'s VLA (variable-length array), but there are reasons to avoid them. (IIRC, Linux source removes the use of VLA recently.) (Also note ISO C99 does have mandated VLA, but ISO C11 turns the support optional.)

Second, there is no reliable and portable way to detect stack space exhaustion. This is often called stack overflow _{(hmm, the etymology of this site)}, but probably more accurately, stack overrun. In reality, this often causes invalid memory access, and the state of the program is then corrupted (... or maybe worse, a security hole). In fact, ISO C++ has no concept of "the stack" and makes it undefined behavior when the resource is exhausted. Be cautious about how much room should be left for automatic objects.

If the stack space runs out, there are too many objects allocated in the stack, which can be caused by too many active calls of functions or improper use of automatic objects. Such cases may suggest the existence of bugs, e.g. a recursive function call without correct exit conditions.

Nevertheless, deep recursive calls are sometimes desired. In implementations of languages requiring support of unbound active calls (where the call depth only limited by total memory), it is impossible to use the (contemporary) native call stack directly as the target language activation record like typical C++ implementations. To work around the problem, alternative ways of the construction of activation records are needed. For example, SML/NJ explicitly allocates frames on the heap and uses cactus stacks. The complicated allocation of such activation record frames is usually not as fast as the call stack frames. However, if such languages are implemented further with the guarantee of proper tail recursion, the direct stack allocation in the object language (that is, the "object" in the language does not stored as references, but native primitive values which can be one-to-one mapped to unshared C++ objects) is even more complicated with more performance penalty in general. When using C++ to implement such languages, it is difficult to estimate the performance impacts.

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I don't think stack allocation and heap allocation are generally interchangable. I also hope that the performance of both of them is sufficient for general use.

I'd strongly recommend for small items, whichever one is more suitable to the scope of the allocation. For large items, the heap is probably necessary.

On 32-bit operating systems that have multiple threads, stack is often rather limited (albeit typically to at least a few mb), because the address space needs to be carved up and sooner or later one thread stack will run into another. On single threaded systems (Linux glibc single threaded anyway) the limitation is much less because the stack can just grow and grow.

On 64-bit operating systems there is enough address space to make thread stacks quite large.

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Usually stack allocation just consists of subtracting from the stack pointer register. This is tons faster than searching a heap.

Sometimes stack allocation requires adding a page(s) of virtual memory. Adding a new page of zeroed memory doesn't require reading a page from disk, so usually this is still going to be tons faster than searching a heap (especially if part of the heap was paged out too). In a rare situation, and you could construct such an example, enough space just happens to be available in part of the heap which is already in RAM, but allocating a new page for the stack has to wait for some other page to get written out to disk. In that rare situation, the heap is faster.

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Aside from the orders-of-magnitude performance advantage over heap allocation, stack allocation is preferable for long running server applications. Even the best managed heaps eventually get so fragmented that application performance degrades.

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Probably the biggest problem of heap allocation versus stack allocation, is that heap allocation in the general case is an unbounded operation, and thus you can't use it where timing is an issue.

For other applications where timing isn't an issue, it may not matter as much, but if you heap allocate a lot, this will affect the execution speed. Always try to use the stack for short lived and often allocated memory (for instance in loops), and as long as possible - do heap allocation during application startup.

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A stack has a limited capacity, while a heap is not. The typical stack for a process or thread is around 8K. You cannot change the size once it's allocated.

A stack variable follows the scoping rules, while a heap one doesn't. If your instruction pointer goes beyond a function, all the new variables associated with the function go away.

Most important of all, you can't predict the overall function call chain in advance. So a mere 200 bytes allocation on your part may raise a stack overflow. This is especially important if you're writing a library, not an application.

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It's not jsut stack allocation that's faster. You also win a lot on using stack variables. They have better locality of reference. And finally, deallocation is a lot cheaper too.

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I think the lifetime is crucial, and whether the thing being allocated has to be constructed in a complex way. For example, in transaction-driven modeling, you usually have to fill in and pass in a transaction structure with a bunch of fields to operation functions. Look at the OSCI SystemC TLM-2.0 standard for an example.

Allocating these on the stack close to the call to the operation tends to cause enormous overhead, as the construction is expensive. The good way there is to allocate on the heap and reuse the transaction objects either by pooling or a simple policy like "this module only needs one transaction object ever".

This is many times faster than allocating the object on each operation call.

The reason is simply that the object has an expensive construction and a fairly long useful lifetime.

I would say: try both and see what works best in your case, because it can really depend on the behavior of your code.

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Stack allocation is a couple instructions whereas the fastest rtos heap allocator known to me (TLSF) uses on average on the order of 150 instructions. Also stack allocations don't require a lock because they use thread local storage which is another huge performance win. So stack allocations can be 2-3 orders of magnitude faster depending on how heavily multithreaded your environment is.

In general heap allocation is your last resort if you care about performance. A viable in-between option can be a fixed pool allocator which is also only a couple instructions and has very little per-allocation overhead so it's great for small fixed size objects. On the downside it only works with fixed size objects, is not inherently thread safe and has block fragmentation problems.

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As others have said, stack allocation is generally much faster.

However, if your objects are expensive to copy, allocating on the stack may lead to an huge performance hit later when you use the objects if you aren't careful.

For example, if you allocate something on the stack, and then put it into a container, it would have been better to allocate on the heap and store the pointer in the container (e.g. with a std::shared_ptr<>). The same thing is true if you are passing or returning objects by value, and other similar scenarios.

The point is that although stack allocation is usually better than heap allocation in many cases, sometimes if you go out of your way to stack allocate when it doesn't best fit the model of computation, it can cause more problems than it solves.

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There's a general point to be made about such optimizations.

The optimization you get is proportional to the amount of time the program counter is actually in that code.

If you sample the program counter, you will find out where it spends its time, and that is usually in a tiny part of the code, and often in library routines you have no control over.

Only if you find it spending much time in the heap-allocation of your objects will it be noticeably faster to stack-allocate them.

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Stack allocation will almost always be as fast or faster than heap allocation, although it is certainly possible for a heap allocator to simply use a stack based allocation technique.

However, there are larger issues when dealing with the overall performance of stack vs. heap based allocation (or in slightly better terms, local vs. external allocation). Usually, heap (external) allocation is slow because it is dealing with many different kinds of allocations and allocation patterns. Reducing the scope of the allocator you are using (making it local to the algorithm/code) will tend to increase performance without any major changes. Adding better structure to your allocation patterns, for example, forcing a LIFO ordering on allocation and deallocation pairs can also improve your allocator's performance by using the allocator in a simpler and more structured way. Or, you can use or write an allocator tuned for your particular allocation pattern; most programs allocate a few discrete sizes frequently, so a heap that is based on a lookaside buffer of a few fixed (preferably known) sizes will perform extremely well. Windows uses its low-fragmentation-heap for this very reason.

On the other hand, stack-based allocation on a 32-bit memory range is also fraught with peril if you have too many threads. Stacks need a contiguous memory range, so the more threads you have, the more virtual address space you will need for them to run without a stack overflow. This won't be a problem (for now) with 64-bit, but it can certainly wreak havoc in long running programs with lots of threads. Running out of virtual address space due to fragmentation is always a pain to deal with.

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Remark that the considerations are typically not about speed and performance when choosing stack versus heap allocation. The stack acts like a stack, which means it is well suited for pushing blocks and popping them again, last in, first out. Execution of procedures is also stack-like, last procedure entered is first to be exited. In most programming languages, all the variables needed in a procedure will only be visible during the procedure's execution, thus they are pushed upon entering a procedure and popped off the stack upon exit or return.

Now for an example where the stack cannot be used:

Proc P
{
  pointer x;
  Proc S
  {
    pointer y;
    y = allocate_some_data();
    x = y;
  }
}

If you allocate some memory in procedure S and put it on the stack and then exit S, the allocated data will be popped off the stack. But the variable x in P also pointed to that data, so x is now pointing to some place underneath the stack pointer (assume stack grows downwards) with an unknown content. The content might still be there if the stack pointer is just moved up without clearing the data beneath it, but if you start allocating new data on the stack, the pointer x might actually point to that new data instead.

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class Foo {
public:
    Foo(int a) {

    }
}
int func() {
    int a1, a2;
    std::cin >> a1;
    std::cin >> a2;

    Foo f1(a1);
    __asm push a1;
    __asm lea ecx, [this];
    __asm call Foo::Foo(int);

    Foo* f2 = new Foo(a2);
    __asm push sizeof(Foo);
    __asm call operator new;//there's a lot instruction here(depends on system)
    __asm push a2;
    __asm call Foo::Foo(int);

    delete f2;
}

It would be like this in asm. When you're in func, the f1 and pointer f2 has been allocated on stack (automated storage). And by the way, Foo f1(a1) has no instruction effects on stack pointer (esp),It has been allocated, if func wants get the member f1, it's instruction is something like this: lea ecx [ebp+f1], call Foo::SomeFunc(). Another thing the stack allocate may make someone think the memory is something like FIFO, the FIFO just happened when you go into some function, if you are in the function and allocate something like int i = 0, there no push happened.

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It has been mentioned before that stack allocation is simply moving the stack pointer, that is, a single instruction on most architectures. Compare that to what generally happens in the case of heap allocation.

The operating system maintains portions of free memory as a linked list with the payload data consisting of the pointer to the starting address of the free portion and the size of the free portion. To allocate X bytes of memory, the link list is traversed and each note is visited in sequence, checking to see if its size is at least X. When a portion with size P >= X is found, P is split into two parts with sizes X and P-X. The linked list is updated and the pointer to the first part is returned.

As you can see, heap allocation depends on may factors like how much memory you are requesting, how fragmented the memory is and so on.

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In general, stack allocation is faster than heap allocation as mentioned by almost every answer above. A stack push or pop is O(1), whereas allocating or freeing from a heap could require a walk of previous allocations. However you shouldn't usually be allocating in tight, performance-intensive loops, so the choice will usually come down to other factors.

It might be good to make this distinction: you can use a "stack allocator" on the heap. Strictly speaking, I take stack allocation to mean the actual method of allocation rather than the location of the allocation. If you're allocating a lot of stuff on the actual program stack, that could be bad for a variety of reasons. On the other hand, using a stack method to allocate on the heap when possible is the best choice you can make for an allocation method.

Since you mentioned Metrowerks and PPC, I'm guessing you mean Wii. In this case memory is at a premium, and using a stack allocation method wherever possible guarantees that you don't waste memory on fragments. Of course, doing this requires a lot more care than "normal" heap allocation methods. It's wise to evaluate the tradeoffs for each situation.

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Never do premature assumption as other application code and usage can impact your function. So looking at function is isolation is of no use.

If you are serious with application then VTune it or use any similar profiling tool and look at hotspots.

Ketan

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I'd like to say actually code generate by GCC (I remember VS also) doesn't have overhead to do stack allocation.

Say for following function:

  int f(int i)
  {
      if (i > 0)
      {   
          int array[1000];
      }   
  }

Following is the code generate:

  __Z1fi:
  Leh_func_begin1:
      pushq   %rbp
  Ltmp0:
      movq    %rsp, %rbp
  Ltmp1:
      subq    $**3880**, %rsp <--- here we have the array allocated, even the if doesn't excited.
  Ltmp2:
      movl    %edi, -4(%rbp)
      movl    -8(%rbp), %eax
      addq    $3880, %rsp
      popq    %rbp
      ret 
  Leh_func_end1:

So whatevery how much local variable you have (even inside if or switch), just the 3880 will change to another value. Unless you didn't have local variable, this instruction just need to execute. So allocate local variable doesn't have overhead.

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