Re: GNU Make 4.4.1 fails in a spectacular fashion on NetBSD 10.0 AMD64

[Dennis Clarke]

On 4/19/24 14:38, Dmitry Goncharov wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 19, 2024 at 1:42 PM Paul Smith <psmith@gnu.org> wrote:
> > The main advantages to alloca are twofold:
> >
> > 1) efficiency for small local buffers, which GNU Make uses a lot.
> >
> > 2) simplification of the code because you don't have to track this
> > memory and ensure it's freed regardless of how the function returns.
>
> Dennis, do you see an alternative that is at least equally efficient,
> simple and portable?
> One alternative that is equally efficient and simple is variable length arrays.
> However, there is a question about portability of vla vs alloca.
>
> regards, Dmitry

    It would take a pile of work and time to climb into the code and
replace all of the alloca() stuff with good ol' malloc/calloc. The work
required would be non-trivial and who knows ... may not be worth the
pain. It would be seriously cool if the code was strictly C99 compliant
but again ... gee ... the pile of work it would take and the testing
also. I do not want to just paint the bike shed here. Just a really non-
trivial task and I am currently pouring over floating point issues in
the BSD world as well as code compliance problems in OpenSSL. There is
no shortage of code work that can be done which would be of benefit but
I think the libC issues take precedence.

--
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken