The problem is that most textbooks draw the opposite, so the student leaves my lecture, opens a book or a slide deck, and now “down” means a different thing.
It gets worse when they get curious and look at a real process with /proc/<pid>/maps. Linux prints mappings from low address to high address as you scroll down (which matches my representation). That is literally reversed from the usual textbook diagram. Students notice and ask why the book is “wrong.”
So I've learned I have to explicitly call this out as notation.
Same story as in electronics class still teaching conventional current flow (positive to negative), even though electrons move the other way (negative to positive). Source: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/direct-current/chp.... Historical convention, and then pedagogy has to patch it forever.
> That means smaller addresses are at the top and larger addresses are at the bottom.
No, my mental model is the exact opposite and this matches the jargon out there.
> also matches what you see in the terminal in /proc/<pid>/maps
I think of this as a sorted list, not as a display or description of a model.
When I drive on a road, I think of think of things on the road near me to have lower addresses in my coordinate system and things further away as having higher addresses. When I write a list of things I see, this will be from left-to-right then from top-to-bottom on a sheet of paper, because it is a list that follows the writing directions of my language/script. When I look at a traffic sign things nearer to me will be at the bottom and things far away at the top, because that's the agreed-upon mental model of a road. When I look at my navi, things near me will be in the center and things far away from me at the edge of the display.
When I write down points in the first sector of the coordinate system, I might order things according to the x-coordinate ascending top-to-bottom. That doesn't mean I would draw the axis inverted.
The correspondence of physical addresses to position is entirely non-linear and also three dimensional so there is no natural top and bottom especially when we are talking about virtual addresses.
When I get taught a new concept I want to get to know the model everyone uses. I will not like a teacher, that tells me a different ordering which is different from how everyone else does it, because this the output of some random command on some random OS, which actually shows a list, not a graph of a memory model. (Sorry that's harsh, of course I still appreciate didactic simplification.)
Maybe the issue is that you consider the stack to be so important to determine the model of the whole process space. When I would draw a stack on it's own, I DO draw it from top-to-bottom. But when I draw a whole process space, I do not, because everything else is mapped/allocated from bottom-to-top. When you invert the direction of the mental model, yes the stack now grows from bottom-to-top. But no, the other things are now allocated from top-to-bottom instead. This are more things: the text, libraries, mmap'd files, and most-used thing: the heap are all allocated inverted now. And the most important thing, the index for all that: the addresses now are allocated from top-to-bottom.
Although thinking about it more, the fact that address indexing is now from top-to-bottom is actually consistent with how I imagine indexing for Nx1 array (or equivalently, how you index matrices in math).
Thinking about it more, I don't think there is any real convention, even diagrams are split. You are going to have to learn to "flip" things either way, the same way matrix indexing differs from cartesian plane indexing. Same way different graphical systems have different conventions for where the origin is. People colloquially say things like "high mem", and you'll have to translate this to your mental model.
It's why I suggested a horizontal, left-to-right visualization. I think everyone would agree that lower addresses on the left, higher addresses on right.
Also could you elaborate more on what you mean by debuggers showing it the opposite direction? If you do `info proc mappings` in gdb it is also lower addresses at top. This might be debugger specific though.