Is replacing alloca(3) where possible a good thing to do?

[Pedro Giffuni]

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.