Re: alloca: Remove Cray-2 and Cray Y-MP support

[Jeffrey Walton]

On Sun, Jul 26, 2020 at 5:53 AM Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> wrote:
>
> The 'alloca' module has a bunch of code for Cray-2 and Cray Y-MP
> machines. These machines had a peak performance of 2 GFLOPS and
> 2.667 GFLOPS, respectively, [1][2] that is, less than half of
> the performance of a Pentium 4 in 2004 [3]. You can therefore bet
> that no one is using such a machine (outside of museums) any more.

All alloca() code should be removed; not just CRAY.

alloca() is a dangerous compiler builtin. It is not part of the C
language. It does not convey failure and it allows hoping over guard
pages.

Many SDLCs ban the use of the function.

Jeff