On 23 Jun 2016 17:05, Florian Weimer wrote:
On 06/23/2016 04:49 PM, Siddhesh Poyarekar wrote:
On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 04:40:42PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
Over all, this decreases the realism of the tests because
it ensures that freshly allocated memory has a well-defined
bit pattern. It also causes malloc to take internal paths
different from regular application usage, and therefore
reduces malloc test coverage.
The well-defined bit pattern is more likely to catch any bad tests
though, which might make it valuable.
It could also cover up bugs which would otherwise be visible with fresh
allocations which contain only zeros.
while certainly true, i think this is much less common of an edge case.
code that happens to work because it happened to get zero-ed memory is,
in my experience, way less common than code that happens to work because
it happened to get garbage initially.