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Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2003 14:54:20 -0400 (EDT)
From: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>
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<<On Thu, 12 Jun 2003 11:37:03 -0700, Tim Kientzle <kientzle@acm.org> said:

> Sounds like alloca() should simply be stricken from libc
> on all architectures.

Yes.  (For values of `all' being `i386'.)

> Might also be a good idea to begin removing uses of it.

Not necessarily.  There's nothing wrong, intrinsically, with using
alloca(), although much but not all of the purpose has been subsumed
by variable-length arrays which I think are in C99.  One merely has to
be aware that it is not part of Standard C (any more than a thousand
other interfaces in FreeBSD) which must be implemented in the
compiler; therefore, one cannot expect programs which expect alloca(3)
to be available and have the standard semantics to work when compiled
with a strictly conforming compiler.  Most compilers do implement
alloca().

-GAWollman