Re: MiNT problems...

[Warwick Allison <warwick@cs.uq.oz.au>]

George Simunovich wrote:
>
>I was having a lot of the same problems that people seem to be having.
>My problems were that some of the GNU utilities quit working after
>patching MiNT 1.10 to h1 and later.  I found the problem was GNU C's
>builtin alloca routine.  It seems that alloca was not requesting memory
>from the OS but getting the memory from the program's (stack or heap not
>real sure).

That's what alloca does.  GNU software is notorious for using alloca rather
than malloc.  I don't know why - probably so they don't have to remember
to delete it.

>From a man entry:

     alloca() allocates size bytes of space in the stack frame of
     the  caller,  and  returns a pointer to the allocated block.
     This temporary space is automatically freed when the  caller
     returns.  Note: if the allocated block is beyond the current
     stack limit, the resulting behavior is undefined.


--
Warwick