Process Memory Structure

In this chapter, we are going to talk about memory and its structure within a process. For a C programmer, memory management is always a crucial topic, and applying its best practices requires a basic knowledge about memory structure. In fact, this is not limited to C. In many programming languages such as C++ or Java, you need to have a fundamental understanding of memory and the way it works; otherwise, you face some serious issues that cannot be easily traced and fixed.

You might know that memory management is fully manual in C, and more than that, the programmer is the sole responsible person who allocates memory regions and deallocates them once they're no longer needed.

Memory management is different in high-level programming languages such as Java or C#, and it is done partly by the programmer and partly by the underlying language platform, such as Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in the case of using Java. In these languages, the programmer only...