Primary reasons why programming language runtimes use stacks?

Posted by manuel aldana on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by manuel aldana
Published on 2011-01-16T17:51:38Z Indexed on 2011/01/16 17:53 UTC
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java

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language-agnostic

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programming-languages

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stack

Many programming language runtime environments use stacks as their primary storage structure (e.g. see JVM bytecode to runtime example).

Quickly recalling I see following advantages:

Simple structure (pop/push), trivial to implement
Most processors are anyway optimized for stack operations, so it is very fast
Less problems with memory fragmentation, it is always about moving memory-pointer up and down for allocation and freeing complete blocks of memory by resetting the pointer to the last entry offset.

Is the list complete or did I miss something? Are there programming language runtime environments which are not using stacks for storage at all?

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