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RE:size limit for static arrays in cygwin/gcc


Danny,

At 12:55 2003-02-17, Danny Smith wrote:
Randall R Schulz <rrschulz at cris dot com>  wrote:

> A couple of months ago, someone reported on how local (stack)
> allocations larger than a certain threshold were allocated on the heap.
> In fact, you, Danny, contributed materially to that thread: Subject
> "Strange behaviour of gcc" starting with a posting by
> fabrizio_ge-wolit@tiscali.it on Dec. 24, 2002.

No that's not quite right:

Stack allocations larger than one page (4KB) cause gcc to probe the stack.
The allocation is still static
I was clearly confused about what "alloca" does: It allocates space on the stack, _not_ on the heap, as I thought.

However, there must be a terminological issue here, because I would describe what alloca does as _dynamic_ stack-resident allocation. It is dynamic because it happens as a result of a run-time call. I understand static to mean an action (allocation, binding, computation, etc.) that is handled entirely at compile and / or link time.


I think, also, the stack probe is automatically called in main, to force
alignment of stack to a page boundary.

...

Danny

Randall Schulz

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