Right, VLA is not just syntactic sugar for alloca, it's also syntactic sugar for accessing and passing around multi-dimensional arrays. The latter two work per

Right, VLA is not just syntactic sugar for alloca, it's also syntactic sugar for accessing and passing around multi-dimensional arrays. The latter two work perfectly fine with heap-allocated arrays. In C89 the ability to pass multi-dimensional arrays to functions was not very useful, since the inner dimensions could not vary at runtime. Fixing this was the main point of the VLA feature, at least for people who work on array data. It would be even more useful, had they supported strided arrays...