Should C++ programmer avoid memset?

Question

I heard a saying that c++ programmers should avoid memset,

class ArrInit {
    //! int a[1024] = { 0 };
    int a[1024];
public:
    ArrInit() {  memset(a, 0         


        

Answer 1

In addition to badness when applied to classes, memset is also error prone. It's very easy to get the arguments out-of-order, or to forget the sizeof portion. The code will usually compile with these errors, and quietly do the wrong thing. The symptom of the bug might not manifest until much later, making it difficult to track down.

memset is also problematic with lots of plain types, like pointers and floating point. Some programmers set all bytes to 0, assuming the pointers will then be NULL and floats will be 0.0. That's not a portable assumption.