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In computing, a stack trace (also called stack backtrace or stack traceback) is a report of the active stack frames at a certain point in time during the execution of a program. When a program is run, memory is often dynamically allocated in two places; the stack and the heap.
A backtrace is a list of the function calls that are currently active in a thread. The usual way to inspect a backtrace of a program is to use an external debugger such as gdb. However, sometimes it is useful to obtain a backtrace programmatically from within a program, e.g., for the purposes of logging or diagnostics.
Techopedia Explains Stack Trace A stack trace works on the "call stack," which is a data structure that provides information about the current subroutine of the program being debugged. The call stack is also known simply as the "stack" or the execution stack, runtime stack or machine stack.
A call stack is typically "the current stack of operations" - i.e. while it's running. A stack trace is typically a copy of the call stack which is logged at some sort of failure, e.g. an exception.
I really though I'd find an answer online, but I couldn't. Is there any difference at all? People say a 'backtrace' is generated upon something throwing an exception, while a stack trace is a list of method calls from the point when the application was started to the point where the exception was thrown. If we supposed a stack-trace as an array, then the last element would be the method where the exception was thrown. Would it be the reverse case for a back-trace? In a programming language like Ruby, for example, if we have:
begin raise 1 rescue p $!.backtrace ; p caller(0) #=> displays the back-trace, then the stack-trace end They will output 2 different arrays, which suggests to me there's something fundamentally different about them.
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