Re: alloca function use discouraged

[Derek Robert Price]

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Conrad T. Pino wrote:

>Hi Derek,
>
>Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD discourage it's use and Linux
>man page explains reasons better than others.
>
>Linux man page:
>http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man3/alloca.3.html
>
>FreeBSD man page:
>http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=alloca
>
>NetBSD man page:
>http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?alloca++NetBSD-current
>
>Given that "alloca" is machine and compiler dependant we
>should give consideration to MS VC "_alloca" function:
>http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/vccore98/HTML/_crt__alloca.asp
>
>Conrad


Hence the GNULIB version.  The GNULIB project attempts to write
portable replacements for functions that do not work consistently
across machines and compilers.

It does look like the GNULIB alloca_.h is trying to use the MSC
version of _alloca, however:

#  ifdef _MSC_VER
#   include <malloc.h>
#   define alloca _alloca
#  endif

This should mean that the alloca.c module is not required to be
compile on Windows, so I don't know why you had to add it to get
fnmatch to compile, if you want to look into this and fix it.  Perhaps
HAVE_ALLOCA_H needs be defined in windows-NT/config.h.in?

Derek

- --
                *8^)

Email: derek@ximbiot.com

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