I have read in several places about buffers and there they say that it is a place in memory to store temporary values so they give an example like this in C:
char exemplo[10];
and they say that this is a buffer , but the exemplo vector is inside the function int main so it would not be allocated in stack ?
More than "holding temporary values", the function of a buffer is to group data into sets that would be too small to handle individually. When a process (usually a communication) has a fixed overhead for each processed data, the larger that data the smaller the significance of the overhead than the process makes useful.
The best examples I can give refer to communication, but as we are talking about C I will give an example of reading a file on the hard drive. Let's say for some reason you want to read one character file per character and do some relatively time-consuming operation with each one. What happens when you ask the computer to read a character from the file?
The hard disk, if it is stopped, begins to rotate. Most of the time, it will already be running;
Depending on where the data is in relation to the read head, the disk can rotate from nothing to an almost complete revolution until you get to the character you want. Once he got there, he copies the character to memory;
Once in memory, your program can access it. It does something with it, and asks for the second character of the file;
It turns out that the disk did not "brake" on that specific character you read: it continued to run, because it would be impractical to stop at that exact point of the last read (first because it might be physically impossible, given its speed, even if it is possible this would spend a lot of energy and / or wear out the materials on the disk, and third because you may have other programs running on the computer that might be waiting to also access the data on the disk);
The result is that the character you want to read now, one after what you have just read, is already "behind": the disk would have to go full circle until the reading head returned point you want to read, and your program would run as slow as it takes for your hard drive to spin (and not at a speed more proportional to your processor's clock ).
What is the solution? Instead of reading a single character from the file, you read several at a time, saving them in a temporary area in memory to read it the next time you want another character. So while the hard drive is running it already copies several characters at once into memory - in a single fraction of a spin - and your program consumes those data from memory with the latency relative to that media (and its caches < in>), and not with hard disk latency.
Being in stack or heap is irrelevant [for this purpose], as explained by bigown . What matters is that you took data from somewhere - the disk, an external storage, a socket - and "queued" that data into memory to consume them at the most appropriate speed for their particular use, regardless of the best treatment thereof at their source. Similarly, you can use a buffer to save the data that you produce, and only send them to their final destination when they have enough volume to be handled by your destination.
Buffer (the article is not of the most elucidative) is essentially an abstract concept. There is no memory area that is a buffer because any area can be one. You define what a buffer is. It is just a set of bytes that is usually stored in a variable temporarily.
In C it is usually organized through an array allocated somewhere in memory. In this example, it is allocated in stack , but nothing prevents it from being allocated in heap as well.
Nothing prevents you from calling your buffer from exemplo but the most common is to give a name that makes it clear that it will be buffer , so the variable could be buffer . It does not change anything technically but leaves the intention clearer, and this is important when we are coding.
Of course, a variable called buffer can be used for other things too, it is only recommended that you do not do it for the sake of organization.
A buffer is used to store any information that comes from somewhere. The details of how this will be done does not concern buffer . It just needs to be allocated somewhere, and the program will set where, and have enough space for what you want at that time.
So technically the buffer does not exist, it's just a form of naming for something common to help you better understand what you're doing.This is valid at least within the context of software programming, especially in C and other high-level languages.