0xDEADBEEF vs. NULL

Question

Throughout various code, I have seen memory allocation in debug builds with NULL...

memset(ptr,NULL,size);

Or with 0xDEA

Answer 1

I would definitely recommend 0xDEADBEEF. It clearly identifies uninitialized variables, and accesses to uninitialized pointers.

Being odd, dereferencing a 0xdeadbeef pointer will definitely crash on the PowerPC architecture when loading a word, and very likely crash on other architectures since the memory is likely to be outside the process' address space.

Zeroing out memory is a convenience since many structures/classes have member variables that use 0 as their initial value, but I would very much recommend initializing each member in the constructor rather than using the default memory fill. You will really want to be on top of whether or not you properly initialized your variables.