On Monday 12 February 2001 15:33, Patrik Stridvall wrote:
So perhaps we should debate whether we should use alloca or not.
It seems this has been decided.
Yes, see below.
I haven't examined or used alloca in years, so its possible that my personal objections don't apply in todays implementations ( a quick test shows gcc on i386 _doesn't_ use a function call these days, for example, so thats no longer a valid reason). So rather than saying its evil, I'll tone down to it simply being unesessary, and continue to avoid it for (no doubt dubious) reasons of 'style'.
I would rather say that the problem of using it, is that it, as Alexandre pointed out, introduces unrecovorable/undetectable errors if we allocate more than one page memory and if we only need a maximum of one page we can just allocate that or less if we know the exact maximum.
The only problem I can see with this approach is that it uses an unnessary amount of stack space for recursive functions, but then I know of no such function in Wine and even if there is one, it is probably better to rewrite it as a non-recursive function anyway.
So yes, the issue is decided.
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Patrik Stridvall