Variable-length arrays are a C99 feature, but not C++ (yet; it has been proposed for C++14). I'm not sure what Laurent's policy is with respect to that, but in my opinion, there's a difference between compiler extensions and platform-dependent libraries that any compiler can use (even more since VLAs are a language feature and not just an addition to the standard library). Note also that VLAs won't compile with the `-pedantic` flag.

I'm not a big fan of arrays anyway (I never use them in my own code), and for dynamic ones, we have `std::vector` which provides a nice standard way. The advantage of VLAs is primarily speed because there is no dynamic allocation; however the code here is not performance-critical.