Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure some compiler settings can change this. I have a fuzzy memory of a bug that went away when compiled with debug flags enabled and the difference was that unassigned variables were being zeroed vs not zeroed.
Yes, actually at my job a co-worker just found exactly such a bug yesterday: Debug build zeroed out the variable and the release build didn’t. So the bug only occurred in the release build, but could not be reproduced on the debug build where the developers work on. So in the end he found it because of the different compiler flags used for debug vs release builds at our work place.
wait, in C++, if you don’t assign the value to that pointer, it’ll be whatever happens to be at that block of memory of something!?
Yep, variables that are merely declared are not initialized, so their value is not guaranteed. Could be anything.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure some compiler settings can change this. I have a fuzzy memory of a bug that went away when compiled with debug flags enabled and the difference was that unassigned variables were being zeroed vs not zeroed.
Yes, actually at my job a co-worker just found exactly such a bug yesterday: Debug build zeroed out the variable and the release build didn’t. So the bug only occurred in the release build, but could not be reproduced on the debug build where the developers work on. So in the end he found it because of the different compiler flags used for debug vs release builds at our work place.