The Linux kernel is a very different environment than user space; it has a very limited stack space (16 KiB IIRC), and the consequences of exceeding that are worse than in user space.
> Google has paid the development effort for the Linux kernel to get rid of all VLA occurrences.
IIRC, what they were really interested in getting rid of was not the normal VLA we're talking about, but something even more esoteric called VLAIS (variable length arrays in structures), which clang didn't support. See https://lwn.net/Articles/441018/ for a discussion about that.
> Google has paid the development effort for the Linux kernel to get rid of all VLA occurrences.
IIRC, what they were really interested in getting rid of was not the normal VLA we're talking about, but something even more esoteric called VLAIS (variable length arrays in structures), which clang didn't support. See https://lwn.net/Articles/441018/ for a discussion about that.