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Document number: N3899

Date: 2014-01-20

Nested Allocation

by Lawrence Crowl

Excerpt:

Stack allocation is generally faster than heap allocation. C and C++ have exploited this speed by allocating statically-sized local variables on the execution stack. With the exception of the rather limited alloca facility, all non-statically-sized objects could only be allocated on the heap.

That is, programmers had the choice between fast-but-limited and general-but-slow.

This paper explores some of the issues when refining allocation choices.