I think you misunderstood the example -- the memory is cleared after use to ensure that if it's reallocated by someone else, or someone hooks up a debugger, the content can't be examined (except when the compiler removes this clearing attempt because of an optimization). Lets say that chunk of memory held a password -- you'd definitely want to clear it after use, even if you immediately free it and never plan to read it again.
That's actually a very good example, but I'd argue that this is actually a violation of the standard: memset is defined as setting the value in memory. Most optimizations on undefined behavior don't really fall into this category.
I guess you could group this kind of thing into the category of "dead code elimination" which is useful, but results in parts of the code written not producing the specified executable. I have to think on this example more.
overgard|10 years ago
copsarebastards|10 years ago
I guess you could group this kind of thing into the category of "dead code elimination" which is useful, but results in parts of the code written not producing the specified executable. I have to think on this example more.