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

One reason that you null the buffer or set it to a special value is that you can easily tell whether the buffer contents is valid or not in the debugger.

Dereferencing a pointer of value "0xDEADBEEF" is almost always dangerous(probably crashes your program/system) because in most cases you have no idea what is stored there.