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Date:      Wed, 14 Sep 2016 21:14:37 +0200
From:      Cedric Blancher <cedric.blancher@gmail.com>
To:        Pedro Giffuni <pfg@freebsd.org>
Cc:        FreeBSD Hackers <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Is replacing alloca(3) where possible a good thing to do?
Message-ID:  <CALXu0UdbDdpu3LZp3_VtwEkgmbj28hOQ5EET%2Bmwj-ZNSSS3GzQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <90f37d14-a187-06b2-6187-7a9c1890a73f@FreeBSD.org>
References:  <d192dbeb-5647-e552-9db1-b478aa7ac057@FreeBSD.org> <CALXu0UcbMtevEx8DP-557MQHVDsJuyBHz9FOWE8OV3UXErPOYA@mail.gmail.com> <90f37d14-a187-06b2-6187-7a9c1890a73f@FreeBSD.org>

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dtrace can do VLA

Are there other arguments?

Ced

On 14 September 2016 at 21:11, Pedro Giffuni <pfg@freebsd.org> wrote:
>
>
> On 14/09/2016 13:54, Cedric Blancher wrote:
>>
>> Who was the "principal Illumos developer"? I remember some heated
>> discussions, mostly rooted in 'we stick with ANSI C' and because the
>> CTF/dwarf tools in Illumos were unable to handle VLA and no one was
>> interested in fixing the BUGS in their toolchain, so the cheapest
>> solution was done: VLA was declared persona non grata. Saves company
>> money.
>
>
> Yes, the non-accessibility of VLAs for Dtrace was the main argument. This
> was a private conversation with Garrett D'Amore who did some nice
> enhancements to our printf(1).
>
>> Typical Sun policy which was one of the reasons which sealed the
>> downfall of Sun Microsystems.
>>
>> But this is NO ARGUMENT for FreeBSD...
>
>
> Our printf(1) implementation has all their enhancements but uses a VLA
> instead of alloca.
>
> This said, whatever illumos wants to keep in their code is relevant as we
> want to make it easy to merge ZFS and Dtrace changes back and forth.
>
> Pedro.



-- 
Cedric Blancher <cedric.blancher@gmail.com>
[https://plus.google.com/u/0/+CedricBlancher/]
Institute Pasteur



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