quality:correction, information:filtering
Advantages and disadvantages

Stack-based allocation can also cause minor performance problems: it leads to variable-size stack frames, so that both stack and frame pointers need to be managed (with fixed-size stack frames, the stack pointer is redundant due to multiplying the stack frame pointer by the size of each frame). This is usually much less costly than calling malloc and free anyway. In particular, if the current function contains both calls to alloca and blocks containing variable-length local data then a conflict occurs between alloca's attempts to increase the current stack frame until the current function exits versus the compiler's need to place local variables of variable length in the same location in the stack frame. This conflict is typically resolved by creating a separate chain of heap storage for each call to alloca. The chain records the stack depth at which each allocation occurs, subsequent calls to alloca in any function trim this chain down to the current stack depth to eventually (but not immediately) free any storage on this chain. A call to alloca with an argument of zero can also be used to trigger the freeing of memory without allocating any more such memory. As a consequence of this conflict between alloca and local variable storage, using alloca might be no more efficient than using malloc.