Re: alloca again

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> I'd argue that providing alloca(3) as anything except a compiler
> builtin is a bug, and that kind of thing should never be used.

I'd argue that alloca should never be used and actually should never
have existed.  As far as I can see it does nothing that can't be done
better - more portably and correctly - by variable-sized arrays.  Am I
missing something?

> Is there any reason we don't simplify this in the headers -
> __builtin_alloca(size) seems to work with every compiler?

It's not part of the language, so "work with every compiler" is, at
best, a heuristic approximation, and is fragile, liable to be broken by
the next compiler to come along.

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