What’s on the Stack & Heap poster
Stack against Heap, side by side.
- Stack: Function locals and call frames
- Stack: Allocated and freed automatically
- Stack: Very fast — just move a pointer
- Stack: Fixed, small size — a few MB
- Stack: Overflow: infinite recursion
- Heap: Objects that outlive their function
- Heap: Explicitly allocated, or garbage collected
- Heap: Slower — must find a free block
- Heap: Large, limited by available RAM
- Heap: Leaks: allocated and never released
- A stack overflow is almost always runaway recursion. A heap exhaustion is almost alwa…
Passing a large object by value copies it. Passing by reference or pointer copies only the address.
Questions about the Stack & Heap poster
- What’s on the Stack & Heap poster?
- Stack against Heap, side by side. Stack: Function locals and call frames; Stack: Allocated and freed automatically; Stack: Very fast — just move a pointer; Stack: Fixed, small size — a few MB; Stack: Overflow: infinite recursion; Heap: Objects that outlive their function; Heap: Explicitly allocated, or garbage collected; Heap: Slower — must find a free block; Heap: Large, limited by available RAM; Heap: Leaks: allocated and never released; A stack overflow is almost always runaway recursion. A heap exhaustion is almost alwa…. Passing a large object by value copies it. Passing by reference or pointer copies only the address.
- Who is the Stack & Heap poster for?
- Stack & Heap belongs to the Computing section rather than to a school year, because computing is not something one grade owns. Anyone learning systems can pin it up — a beginner, a student mid-course, or someone revising years later.
- When should you use the Stack & Heap poster?
- Stack is automatic and fast. Heap is manual or collected, and flexible. A wall chart earns its place by being glanceable from where the work is happening, so Stack & Heap belongs on the wall where that computing work actually happens, within glancing distance, rather than filed away.
- What other posters go with Stack & Heap?
- Caching, Concurrency & Parallelism and DNS sit alongside Stack & Heap in the Computing section. Printed together they make a wall rather than a single sheet, which is how a reference set actually gets used.CachingConcurrency & ParallelismDNS
- Is the Stack & Heap poster free to download and print?
- Yes. Stack & Heap downloads as a free PDF with no account, no email and no watermark, like everything else in the Computing section. Print as many copies as you like for a home, a classroom, a library or a tutoring group; reselling the file is the only thing the licence rules out.Read the licence
- What size does the Stack & Heap poster print at?
- Stack & Heap is a vector PDF laid out for US Letter, and prints on A4 with Fit to page — the same file, no separate download. Because every mark on it is drawn rather than photographed, it stays sharp enlarged to A3, A2 or A1 at a copy shop. Colour carries emphasis only, so a greyscale print of Stack & Heap loses nothing.Printing guide
Related posters
Charts that sit alongside Stack & Heap on the same wall.
Browse every Computing poster, or start from the full catalogue.