I have been working on my primitive game, and up till now I have been loading verteces and triangles form OBJ files into linked lists. I went to change the program to use VLAs instead, but ran into trouble. I need the VLAs to be global, as it is a glut program, but the C standard does not allow VLAs to have file scope. Is there a loophole or something I can exploit to allow me to use VLAs or is there some alternative? Will I just have to hard wire the array sizes in? What do you guys use for storing OBJ data?

What exactly is a VLA?

I have no idea what a VLA is, but I use malloc'd memory to store OBJ data... I can't imagine anyone else does anything else.

a VLA is a Variable Length Array. For example:

So malloc is the way to go? ok thanks.

Are you sure? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VLA

I fail to see the difference between your VLA which google hasn't appeared to have heard of to an array - does it say this in a textbook somewhere?

google "variable length array". Its an array whose initialization size parameter is a variable. for example:
normal array:
variable length array:

We know what a variable-length array is, but VLA is not a common abbreviation for it.

Incidentally, variable-length arrays are not legal in C++, ObjC, or C (prior to C99). GCC allows them by default anyway, though -- how nice of it :|