[LUCY-100] Use alloca() for strings

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Fixed
• Component/s: Core
• Assignee: Marvin Humphrey
• Reporter: Marvin Humphrey
• Created: 16/Feb/10 00:17
• Updated: 19/Feb/10 17:35
• Resolved: 19/Feb/10 17:35

Description

For security and reliability, Lucy eschews C-style NULL-terminated strings
except when absolutely necessary, favoring CharBuf objects instead. However,
we would prefer to keep structs opaque and to use stack memory instead of heap
memory for small string values. Furthermore, we would like to use object
pointers consistently rather than object structs.

These ends can be achieved by deploying the the non-standard but widely
available stack memory allocator alloca().