Which is faster: Stack allocation or Heap allocation

Question

This question may sound fairly elementary, but this is a debate I had with another developer I work with.

I was taking care to stack allocate things where I could, i

Answer 1

A stack has a limited capacity, while a heap is not. The typical stack for a process or thread is around 8K. You cannot change the size once it's allocated.

A stack variable follows the scoping rules, while a heap one doesn't. If your instruction pointer goes beyond a function, all the new variables associated with the function go away.

Most important of all, you can't predict the overall function call chain in advance. So a mere 200 bytes allocation on your part may raise a stack overflow. This is especially important if you're writing a library, not an application.