Depressing and faintly terrifying days for the C standard [pdf]
At Microsoft the compiler team (Visual C++) and the Windows team are joined at the hip. I'm sure the same was true at Sun. This can lead to good decisions about undefined behavior that I hope would make Linus smile.<p>I recently learned of one such good engineering decision (I hope I'm remembering it correctly). Let's say you have a struct with an int32 and a byte in it. That's 5 bytes, right? But the platform alignment is a multiple of 4 bytes, so there's 3 bytes of padding (sizeof the struct is 8 bytes). If we stack-allocate an array of 11 of these and zero-initialize with = { 0 }, what would you expect to see in memory after initialization?<p>It turns out the answer <i>was</i> that the first element of the array would have its 5 bytes zeroed, but the 3 bytes of padding would be left uninitialized. Then, the remaining 10 elements of the array would be zeroed with a memset that actually zeroed all 80 remaining bytes. It sounds weird but this is a legal thing to do from the standard's perspective. All they're obligated to zero out are the non-padding bytes. This UB was leading to disclosure of little bits of kernel memory back into user mode because Windows engineers assumed that = { 0 } was the same as leaving the variable uninitialized and then memsetting the whole thing to zero. Nope!<p>The compiler team fixed this by always zeroing out padding too. Problem solved. There are some cases where it's not quite as fast. But it's the right engineering decision by the compiler team for their customers, both internal and external.