24.4 Maintaining the stack

This section discusses in detail the requirements for maintaining the stack. In some cases, such as implementation using a Perl array, fulfilling these requirements is trivial. Perl auto-extends its arrays, and initializes the element values, on every read or write. For the C programmer, things are not quite so easy.

In this section, we will assume a C89 standard-conformant C application. This assumption is convenient on two grounds. First, this will be the intended use for many readers. Second, standard-conformant C89 is a “worst case”. Any issue faced by a programmer in another environment is likely to also be one that must be solved by the C programmer.

Libmarpa often optimizes away unnecessary stack writes to stack locations. When it does so, it will not necessarily optimize away all reads to that stack location. This means that a location’s first access, as suggested by the Libmarpa step instructions, may be a read. This possibility requires a special awareness from the C programmer. See Sizing the stack.