Hey Folks, So I've been wondering about variable length arrays from c99 for a while now. They seem to me like a good way to avoid lots of trivial calls to malloc/free at least for smaller arrays that aren't going to blow up the stack. That said I don't see them being used.
The promise of them seems to be 'easy', dynamic, stack allocated memory and improved readability. That said, using vla's avoids the work on malloc that creates a hostile (strict) environment, like junking and whatnot. Also there is the portability stuff, I'm not sure if all the platforms that openbsd runs on are using a compiler that supports them yet. gcc 4.2 in base seems to support them well enough, though I note that the gcc website says that some corner cases were fixed in version 4.5 which I haven't investigated yet. So what do you guys think? VLA's, are they good, bad, evil, stupid, all of the above? -- Ted Bullock
