The Stack vs The Heap

• Stack: Continuous area of memory for local variables.

• Values have fixed sizes known at compile time.

• Extremely fast: just move a stack pointer.
• Easy to manage: follows function calls.
• Great memory locality.

• Heap: Storage of values outside of function calls.

• Values have dynamic sizes determined at runtime.

• Slightly slower than the stack: some book-keeping needed.
• No guarantee of memory locality.