How can I enable the use of VLAs, variable length arrays as defined in C99, in MS Visual C++ or that is not possible at all?
Yes I know that the C++ standard is based on C89 and that VLAs are not available in C89 standard and thus aren't available in C++, but MSVC++ is supposed to be a C compiler also, a behavior that can be switched on using the /TC compiler parameter (Compile as C Code (/TC)
). But doing so does not seem to enable VLAs and the compiling process fails with the same errors when building as C++ (Compile as C++ Code (/TP)
). Maybe MSVC++ C compiler is C89 compliant only or I am missing something (some special construct or pragma/define)?
Code sample:
#include <stdlib.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
char pc[argc+5];
/* do something useful with pc */
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}
Compile errors:
error C2057: expected constant expression
error C2466: cannot allocate an array of constant size 0
error C2133: 'pc' : unknown size
MSVC is not a C99 compiler, and does not support variable length arrays.
At https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/c-language/ansi-conformance MSVC is documented as conforming to C90.
VLA's are much neater to write but you can get similar behaviour using alloca()
when the dynamic memory allocation of std::vector
is prohibitive.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x9sx5da1.aspx
Using alloca()
in your example would give:
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <alloca.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
char* pc = (char*) alloca(sizeof(char) * (argc+5));
/* do something useful with pc */
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}
I met same problem, this is not possible in MS Visual C++ 2015, instead you can use vector to do almost the same, only difference is neglectable overhead of heap resource manage routine(new/delete).
Although VLAs is convenient, but to allocate non-deterministic amount of memory from the stack at risk of stack overflow is generally not a good idea.
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