Chris Meyer wrote: > I noticed that when I call a recursive function there is extra space > allocated on the stack. You mean this subl, say? > subl $12, %esp > pushl $3 > call factorial It's keeping the stack pointer 16-byte aligned. If you passed two arguments it would have subled $8 first, etc. This isn't unique to recursive functions. Why? It's probably so you can get all the arguments in a single L1 cache load or something. I'd guess it's in the Intel's optimisation guide, downloadable as part of the architecture docs. Rup.
