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> 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)
