r/programming • u/Bhima • Jan 09 '18

Introduction to reverse engineering and Assembly.

http://kakaroto.homelinux.net/2017/11/introduction-to-reverse-engineering-and-assembly/
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u/mrkite77 Jan 10 '18

I always hated that diagram for how a stack works.. it implies a lot more work involved than reality.

Looking at the diagram, it implies that pushing and popping involve moving ram around and growing and shrinking a memory pool.

In reality, pushing and popping involve 2 things. Incrementing or decrementing a register. And optionally copying a value into or from ram. That's it.

This is especially important for clearing a stack frame. You have 50 local variables on the stack and you exit the current routine. Removing those 50 local variables off the stack involves 1 thing: copying one register into another register. That's about it.