Runtime allocation of multidimensional array-Collection of common programming errors

So far I thought that the following syntax was invalid,

int B[ydim][xdim];

But today I tried and it worked! I ran it many times to make sure it did not work by chance, even valgrind didn’t report any segfault or memory leak!! I am very surprised. Is it a new feature introduced in g++? I always have used 1D arrays to store matrices by indexing them with correct strides as done with A in the program below. But this new method, as with B, is so simple and elegant that I have always wanted. Is it really safe to use? See the sample program.

PS. I am compiling it with g++-4.4.3, if that matters.

#include 
#include 

int test(int ydim, int xdim) {
// Allocate 1D array
    int *A = new int[xdim*ydim](); // with C++ new operator
    // int *A = (int *) malloc(xdim*ydim * sizeof(int)); // or with C style malloc
    if (A == NULL)
        return EXIT_FAILURE;

// Declare a 2D array of variable size
    int B[ydim][xdim];

// populate matrices A and B
    for(int y = 0; y < ydim; y++) {
        for(int x = 0; x < xdim; x++) {
            A[y*xdim + x] = y*xdim + x;
            B[y][x] = y*xdim + x;
        }
    }

// read out matrix A
    for(int y = 0; y < ydim; y++) {
        for(int x = 0; x < xdim; x++)
            std::cout