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Full Discussion: Use of alloca function
Top Forums Programming Use of alloca function Post 302365234 by Corona688 on Monday 26th of October 2009 11:41:00 AM
Old 10-26-2009
Quote:
Originally Posted by shamrock
Use of alloca is discouraged because it is system dependent...
How system dependent? Linux has it, Windows has it, IRIX has it, Solaris has it, BSD has it, OSX has it, HPUX seems to have it... The only platform I can think of offhand that I can't verify is AIX, and that's a "maybe", not a "no". It seems too useful, even internally, for vendors to not implement... I will admit that some embedded platforms implement it badly(a severe error on systems with no malloc!), allowing alloca'd memory to be overwritten by further function calls, but I'm not aware of an embedded platform with threading. I suspect the kind of stack management needed for threading also lets alloca exist.
Quote:
also the memory returned cant be passed to other functions since it is freed as soon as the function that calls alloca exits.
You can certainly pass it to other functions if you keep in mind its scope, the exact same way you can pass references to stack variables if you keep in mind their scope. For a thread, it will be valid as long as the thread exists.
Quote:
With alloca portability is the biggest concern if developing apps for different platforms.
Please note any platforms you know of that don't have alloca.

Last edited by Corona688; 10-26-2009 at 12:53 PM..
 

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ALLOCA(3)						   BSD Library Functions Manual 						 ALLOCA(3)

NAME
alloca -- memory allocator LIBRARY
Standard C Library (libc, -lc) SYNOPSIS
#include <stdlib.h> void * alloca(size_t size); DESCRIPTION
The alloca() function allocates size bytes of space in the stack frame of the caller. This temporary space is automatically freed on return. RETURN VALUES
The alloca() function returns a pointer to the beginning of the allocated space. SEE ALSO
brk(2), calloc(3), getpagesize(3), malloc(3), realloc(3) HISTORY
The alloca() function appeared in Version 32V AT&T UNIX. BUGS
The alloca() function is machine and compiler dependent; its use is discouraged. The alloca() function is slightly unsafe because it cannot ensure that the pointer returned points to a valid and usable block of memory. The allocation made may exceed the bounds of the stack, or even go further into other objects in memory, and alloca() cannot determine such an error. Avoid alloca() with large unbounded allocations. BSD
September 5, 2006 BSD
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