Hi, Ahelenia!
On 8/24/21 12:33 PM, Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) wrote:
And apart from what Michael (and Branden) already said, I have one
question that has not been treated before it seems:
AFAIK, VLAs are 100% equivalent to alloca() (except for the obvious
syntax differences). And considering the VLA syntax is much nicer than
alloca(), and is in the standard (IIRC, C99 added VLAs, and C11 declared
them optional), what about adding a NOTES subsection that recommends (or
at least mentions) VLAs?
And they both share the problem of smashing the stack if you try to
allocate an array to big (and none of them has a way to check if it will
happen, AFAIK).
Now that I think, there's a slight difference, of course: VLAs live in
their block scope, while alloca() lives in the function scope, allowing
to embed it in a macro such as strdupa().
But maybe still worth mentioning VLAs in alloca(3).
Cheers,
Alex
--
Alejandro Colomar
Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/
