Storage allocators

[John Quarterman]

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Date: Wed, 31 Jul 85 13:14:10 edt
From: Arnold Robbins <gatech!arnold>
Subject: Storage allocators
To: cbosgd!std-c, ut-sally!std-unix
Keywords: stack allocation, standardizing undocumented features

Unix has long had an undocumented routine alloca(), which allocates
storage off the stack.  This storage then goes away when the function
returns.

I would like to see this documented in the Unix standard under development,
and also included in the new ANSI C standard.  I would suggest that
the name get changed to something like salloc() [stack alloc], with
semantics similar to malloc (returned storage probably initialized to
garbage), only the storage is temporary, not permanent.

I think that cross posting to both groups is appropriate, since C supports
variables on the stack, so I doubt that there are many machines which can't
do alloca(), and for Unix, it comes down to documenting something that
has been there for a long time.

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