looks like you are arguing what "sparingly" means in that context because the rest of the sentence is totally valid. Stack and Heap allocation in C serve different purposes and there's really no rule of thumb to choose one and there's not even one case more frequent than the other. Allocate objects in the stack, it's faster. Unless you need a reference in a function in another context. Or it's too big. Or you're going going to share it between threads. Or whatever.