An overview of how operating systems give processes their own address space.

Playful Programming

Operating systems use virtual memory to give each process its own seemingly infinite address space, abstracting away physical memory via page tables. In C/C++, virtual memory is divided into four regions: Code, Static/Global, Stack, and Heap. The stack stores local variables using LIFO order and is automatically managed, while the heap stores dynamically allocated objects that persist beyond function scope and require manual deallocation with delete or free(). Failing to manage heap memory leads to memory leaks, and accessing uninitialized heap pointers causes segfaults, as demonstrated with a practical C++ vector example.

Virtual Memory Overview