A method used for walking forward through a binary image of a procedure to identify a return instruction, and while walking forward through the binary image, identifying a set of instructions that affect the distance to a return address stored in the stack. After calculating distance structure variables based on the set of instructions, and using the distance structure variables to update the stack pointer and the instruction pointer, returning to walk forward through the binary image pointed to by the updated instruction pointer. This continues until the stack is empty, and then a list of all instruction pointers are returned, as a call chain. An additional optimization includes caching a list on instruction pointer addresses with already computed distance structure variables.