Its a giant peeve of mine that automatic memory management, in the C language sense of the resource being freed at the end of its lexical scope, is tied to the allocation being on the machine stack which in practice may have incredibly limited size. Gar! Why!?
Ackshually, it has nothing to do with the C language. It's an implementation choice by some compilers. A conforming implementation could give you the whole RAM and swap to your stack.
Yes, but does any implementation actually do that?
AFAIK Ada is typically more flexible, but that has to do with the language actually giving you enough facilities to avoid heap allocations in more cases - e.g. you can not only pass VLAs into a function in Ada, but also return one from a function. So it becomes idiomatic, and compilers then have to support this (usually by maintaining a second "large" stack).
