But malloc() doesn't always signal failure with a null in many modern systems. It will happily return you a region of unpopulated virtual address and then SIGSE

But malloc() doesn't always signal failure with a null in many modern systems. It will happily return you a region of unpopulated virtual address and then SIGSEGV you when you try to use it. (With overcommit). I think we can leave VLAs in the "trust the programmer" category. Very handy with bounded sizes; it keeps you from wasting all those warm cache lines.