Making alloca more safe
Denis Koroskin
2korden at gmail.com
Mon Nov 16 01:34:15 PST 2009
C standard library alloca function has an undefined behavior when
requested size is large enough to cause a stack overflow, but many (good)
implementations return null instead. So does DMD, for example. I believe
it would be even better to go ahead and enforce D implementation to return
a GC allocated chunk of memory instead of null in that case. It will not
incur any performance hit in 99.9% of the cases and prevent a bug from
being happen in the rest. It will also make writing code using it easier
(and more safe), since you don't have to worry about possible stack
overflow/null-dereference.
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