GNU and alloca()

[Karl Berry.]

The various GNU programs are not meant to necessarily
be portable to other operating systems -- they are
only supposed to work under GNU. Since GNU
will support alloca(), any GNU program is free to
use it. I don't know that it has anything in
particular to do with garbage collection.

That's the theory. In practice, no GNU kernel exists yet,
and so the various GNU programs can only be run
under ``foreign'' operating systems. I guess the ones
that the author of grep (Mike Haertel, I believe) tried
it under had a good enough alloca() to make his grep work,
regardless of whether it is possible to implement correctly an
alloca for all situations.