Empirical and analytic study of stack versus heap cost for languages with closures

Abstract

We present a comprehensive analysis of all the components of creation, access and disposal of heap-allocated and stack-allocated activation records. Among our results are:•Although stack frames are known to have a better cache read-miss rate than heap frames, our simple analytical model (backed up by simulation results) shows that the difference is too trivial to matter.•The cache write-miss rate of heap frames is very high; we show that a variety of miss-handling strategies (exemplified by specific modern machines) can give good performance, but not all can.•Stacks restrict the flexibility of closure representations (for higher-order functions) in important (and costly) ways.•The extra load placed on the garbage collector by heap-allocated frames is small.•The demands of modern programming languages make stacks complicated to implement efficiently and correctly.Overall, the execution cost of stack-allocated and heap-allocated frames is similar; but heap frames are simpler to implement and allow very efficient first-class continuations.