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Software Engineering vocabulary · Programming Concepts

Call stack

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCore term

In software engineering, call stack means: The structure that keeps track of active function calls, usually with the most recent call on top.

In Turkish: çağrı yığını

How it is used

Common in debugging recursion, exceptions, and runtime errors. Developers inspect it to see how execution reached a specific function or failure.

Example sentences

  1. The service hit a recursion bug, and the call stack kept growing until the process crashed in production.

    Here the term shows the chain of nested function calls expanding without stopping, which leads to a stack overflow and crash.

  2. When the exception appeared, the engineer checked the call stack to find which controller invoked the failing method.

    In this sentence, the term means the recorded path of calls that helps locate the code path leading to the failing method.

Common collocations

  • inspect the call stack
  • call stack depth
  • call stack overflow
  • callTo make a function, method or API run from another part of the code. As a noun, 'a call' is one such request, for example 'an API call'.
  • stack traceA report printed when an error happens, listing the chain of function calls that led to it, with file names and line numbers.

More terms: Programming Concepts

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