How Stack, Heap, and Memory Layout Divide the Work
When a program crashes, logs may mention stack overflow, segmentation fault, out of memory, or heap corruption. These are all memory-related, but they are not the same kind of failure.
Stack, heap, globals, text, and mmap regions are not merely “different memory blocks.” They serve different lifetimes, access patterns, and runtime constraints.
A useful first model is: text stores instructions, data stores global state, the stack stores function calls and local execution state, the heap stores dynamically allocated objects, and mmap regions store file mappings, shared memory, large anonymous mappings, and dynamic libraries.
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