standards - Are there stackless or heapless implementation of C++?

Question

C++ standard does not mention anything about the stack or the heap, they are implementation specific, which is true.

Even though they are not part of the C++ standard, we end up using them anyway, so much that it's like they are part of the language itself and have to be taken into consideration for memory or performance purpose.

Hence my question are there implementations of C++ that doesn't use stacks and heaps?

Answer 1

Others have already given good answers about the heap, so I'll leave that alone.

Some implementations (e.g., on IBM mainframes) don't use a stack as most people would think of it, for the simple reason that the hardware doesn't support it. Instead, when you call a function, an activation record (i.e., space for the locals, arguments, and return address) is allocated from (their version of) the heap. These activation records are built into a linked list.

From a purely abstract viewpoint, this is certainly a stack -- it supports last-in, first-out semantics, just like any other stack. You do have to look at it pretty abstractly to call it a stack though. If you showed people a diagram of the memory blocks linked together, I think it's safe to guess most programmers would describe it as a linked list. If you pushed them, I think most would judge it something like "yeah, you can use it in a stack-like manner, but it's still a linked list."