Re: alloca is bad?

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313 at cygnus dot com>]

Chris Faylor wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 05:39:29AM -0500, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >> Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 21:20:32 -0500
> >> From: Christopher Faylor <cgf@redhat.com>
> >>
> >> I was surprised by this assertion and so I thought I'd ask for a
> >> consensus here.  Should the use of alloca be deprecated in gdb?
> >
> >In my experience, there's nothing wrong with alloca as long as it is
> >used for allocating small buffers.  The only consideration is that not
> >every platform supports alloca.
> 
> But, since alloca is already entrenched in gdb and available in liberty
> I don't think this is an issue, is it?

There are a many entrenched practices in GDB and many of those we don't
want to perpetuate.  Typically, these were either viewed as innocent
short-cuts or simply as good ideas.  In hindsight (we've 15 years worth
now :-) these practices turned out to be somewhat misguided.  Part of
our penance is that on-going maintenance expense we incur when ever we
touch the code.

Consider Peter S's example as a case in point - it looked harmless :-)

	enjoy,
		Andrew