SonarCloud reports the following problem in MethodComparator::methods_EMCP:
 "Address of stack memory associated with local variable 's_new' is still referred to by the global variable '_s_new' upon returning to the caller. This will be a dangling reference"

Code inspection reveals the assignment to static variables is only needed to pass them to helper methods. So, while this is not a detectable bug (yet), it is still cleaner not to expose stack variables in globals.