I now regret helping with this effort, since people use it as arguments against using VLAs in general, although in my opinion this is clearly the wrong conclusion outside of the kernel. VLAs are basically always superior to the next best alternative: They are safer than alloca() (and standard's compliant), they are faster than heap allocation (and similar safe), and use less stack and allow better bounds checking than a worst-case fixed-size arrays on the stack (but are slower).