Fast Call-Stack Backtrace

Introduction When developing a profiler, memory tracker, or logger, you need to programmatically access the call stack to trace how a program reached the location where a method is called. Operating systems offer APIs for call stack tracing, but these are often too slow for practical real-time use. This article will try to demystify all ways of obtaining call-stack traces on different platforms, and I won’t cover resolving debug symbol names here.