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Asked: 2026-06-03T22:10:35+00:00

I have been reading up on the call stack lately. However all examples and

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I have been reading up on the call stack lately. However all examples and articles I have been reading has been single threaded. I am interested in how the call stack looks like in memory and how we can analyse it.

Sorry for including so many questions in one post. But it seems messy to create one post for each question when they are all related.

My questions here are for Windows x86.
So the questions I am having difficulty with is:

  1. Is there always one call stack for each thread in a process? Ie, threads do not share call stacks?

  2. Is the size of each call stack fixed? Or can it be different for each thread?

  3. Let’s pretend that we are doing everything ourselves and write our program in assembly. Is the call stack magically given to us? Or do we have to implement it ourselves?

  4. If we make our program in assembly, do we then reserve some memory and set the call stack memory start address to ESP in order to set it up?

-Michael

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    1) Each thread has its own stack – almost by definition.

    2) Maximum stack size is a process limit, specified in header. Initial thread stack size is a thread creation parameter – see CreateThread() API.

    3) The OS manages all memory. The stack for new threads is dynamically allocated by the kernel upon thread creation and the top of the stack filled in with a stack frame that, amongst other stuff, allows the thread to begin execution by popping the frame in a similar manner to an interrupt-return. Don’t try to do this at home.

    4) NO! Import and call the CreateThread() API.

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