Re: pointers and Windows debugging

John Barstow wrote:

>Two things I've been noticing in the code lately seem odd. Probably it's
>just my background, but I feel somewhat disquieted by them.
>
>1) Pointers are not initialized to NULL. This may not matter too much on
>Unix, but on Windows, uninitialized pointers point to random locations in
>memory. This makes debugging very painful and bugs very unpredictable -
>especially since the problem is less pronounced in debug mode.
>
>

Initializing pointers to NULL "just in case" is a dangerous practice. It
makes the use-without-initialization bugs harder much to find, because
the NULL init fools the compiler into thinking the pointer was
initialized, even when NULL is not a valid value for that pointer..

-- 
Brane Čibej   <brane_at_xbc.nu>   http://www.xbc.nu/brane/
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