Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!ucsd!ucbvax!decwrl!megatest!djones
From: djones@megatest.UUCP (Dave Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: alloca wars
Message-ID: <697@goofy.megatest.UUCP>
Date: 4 Aug 88 20:40:57 GMT
References: <696@ns.UUCP>
Organization: Megatest Corporation, San Jose, Ca
Lines: 15

From article <696@ns.UUCP>, by ddb@ns.UUCP (David Dyer-Bennet):
> 
>    Well, the reasons why alloca is difficult to implement seem convincing.
> However, the only point I ever saw to alloca was the automatic deallocation
> on exit.  If you don't have that, what advantage is there over malloc or
> any of the standard allocation routines?
>

Speed.  The malloc() on in Sun3 OS, for example, is incredibly slow
after a few thousand blocks have been allocated.  As has been pointed
out, a memory allocation package built on a separate stack could
be used.  (But then you miss the automatic deallocation, of course.)


		-- djones