Question

I was working on a program in Netbeans on Linux using a gcc compiler when, upon switching to Visual C++ on Windows 7, the code failed to compile as Visual C++ says it expected constant expression on several lines. On Netbeans, I simply did something similar to char name[fullName.size()];, while on Visual C++, I tried, among other things,

const int position = fullName.size();
char Name[position];

How can I create a constant to use for the array?

Note: I know about this question, but is there any way I can get this working without using vectors, since that would require a re-write of many parts of the program?

Answer 1

In VC++ you can’t do runtime declarations of stack array sizes, but you can do stack allocation via _alloca

so this:

const int position = fullName.size();
char Name[position];

becomes this:

const int position = fullName.size();
char * Name = (char*)_alloca(position * sizeof(char));

It’s not quite the same thing, but it’s as close as you are going to get in VC++.