this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yep, variables that are merely declared are not initialized, so their value is not guaranteed. Could be anything.

[–] waz 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

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.