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Software Engineering vocabulary · Programming Concepts

Stack frame

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In software engineering, stack frame means: The memory block created for a function call, holding local data, parameters, and return information during execution.

In Turkish: yığın çerçevesi

How it is used

Used in debugging, compiler, and runtime discussions. Often appears with recursion, call stack, local variables, and stack traces.

Example sentences

  1. The debugger showed a separate stack frame for each recursive call, which made the runaway factorial bug easy to trace.

    Here it refers to one function call's execution context, so multiple recursive calls appear as repeated frames on the call stack.

  2. After the crash, the engineer inspected the stack frame to confirm that the local buffer had overwritten nearby memory.

    In this sentence, the term points to the function's local memory area, where corrupted local data can reveal what went wrong.

Common collocations

  • current stack frame
  • stack frame layout
  • inspect a stack frame
  • 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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