Unused Static Stack Varibles

Hey /prog/,

In C, are variables located in the stack recycled/freed when they are no longer needed? I suppose that this depends on the compiler, but does anyone know if GCC does this?

To be a little clearer, let's say I have these two translation units...

main.c/.h
settings.c/.h

main() calls the function get_settings() (located in settings.c) which will fill the variables (located in main.c) with data read from a file and then returns.

Since there is no longer any purpose for the staic variables declared in settings.c, are they freed once get_settings() returns?

Isn't it inefficient in terms of space to store initialized static constants in the executable? They could potentially be quite large, and that extra space is basically wasted on every download of your executable file.