Controling CRT memory initialization
- by Ofek Shilon
Occasionally you meet bugs that are reproducible only in release builds and/or only on some machines. A common (but by no means only) reason is uninitialized variables, that are subject to random behaviour. E.g, an uninitialized BOOL can be TRUE most of the time, on most machines, but randomly be initialized as FALSE.
What I wish I would have is a systematic way of flushing out such bugs by modifying the behaviour of the CRT memory initialization. I'm well aware of the MS debug CRT magic numbers - at the very least I'd like to have a trigger to turn 0xCDCDCDCD (the pattern that initializes freshly allocated memory) to zeros. I suspect one would be able to easily smoke out nasty
initialization pests this way, even in debug builds.
Am I missing an available CRT hook (API, registry key, whatever) that enables this? Anyone has other ideas to get there?
