This is going to be some what of a newbie question but I was trying to work on a small exercise in the C Language (not C++) and I was running into some iss
Variable length arrays(VLA) are a C99 feature and Visual Studio until recently did not support C99 and I am not sure if it currently supports VLA in the lastest version. gcc on the other hand does support C99 although not fully. gcc supports VLA as an extension outside of C99 mode, even in C++.
From the draft C99 standard section 6.7.5.2
Array declarators paragraph 4:
[...] If the size is an integer constant expression and the element type has a known constant size, the array type is not a variable length array type; otherwise, the array type is a variable length array type.