ANSI C, Variable Length Array, Dynamic Memory Allocation, Memory Reservation and Late Binding

ISO C89/90 Standard does not support variable length array. However, gcc compiler provides variable length array functionality as an compiler extension, in which a VLA can be declared like any other automatic arrays. The storage is allocated at the point of declaration and deallocated when the block scope containing the declaration exits.

Dynamic Memory Allocation (malloc) can be used to implement VLA at run time with overhead cost introduced. It should be noted that malloc may be failed if the required memory block is not available (return null pointer).

The reason behind using dynamic memory allocation in c-lang is that we will frequently meet situations when we have no information regarding the size of the data that the program will receive at compile time.

Memory reservation refers the process of compiler time memory allocation, as opposed to dynamic memory allocation, which is the process of making requests for memory blocks to OS.

Compiler time memory allocation determines the relative location for each array object declared with respect to the stack frame of the program.