Re: ISO opposes variable-length arrays???

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > A. VLAs make code less safe, due to problems with stack overflow and 
  > related issues. There is no portable way for a program to detect and 
  > recover from memory exhaustion, and indeed in many implementations 
  > (including default GNU, if I'm not mistaken) the system does not even 
  > detect memory exhaustion reliably - the program merely has undefined 
  > behavior instead. This dangerous behavior is particularly important in 
  > multithreaded apps where each thread has a relatively small stack.

Is that any worse with VLAs than with `alloca'?
If not, we may as well use VLAs instead.

  > B. They make code a bit slower.

Slower than what alternative?  Using `malloc' to allocate the array?
Using `alloca'?  And in what way is it slower?  Is there a case where
the slowdown is significant?

Anyway, I'm glad that the feature remains as "optional".  That is much
less of a steb backwards than what I first thought was the case.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)