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

[Cedric Blancher]

dtrace can do VLA

Are there other arguments?

Ced

On 14 September 2016 at 21:11, Pedro Giffuni <pfg at 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 at gmail.com>
[https://plus.google.com/u/0/+CedricBlancher/]
Institute Pasteur