[tremor] Re: good version of alloca()

[Monty]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 01:10:34AM +0200, Dimitry Andric wrote:
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> On 2002-10-14 at 18:23:52 timmy brolin wrote:
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> tb> Can alloca() be replaced by malloc() and free ?
> tb> That'd be a nice patch sine many dev systems don't include alloca().
> 
> Well, this might not be so simple as it sounds. The reason is that
> allocations made using alloca() don't need to be freed explicitly, as
> is the case with malloc(). They are implicitly freed when a function
> exits and its stack is popped.

Actually, the real reason to use alloca is that it's about three asm
opcodes, can be inlined trivially, requires no system call, will not
add to heap fragmentation, etc, etc.  It is the fast way to get
temporary storage.  very fast.  

Monty
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