[PATCH proposal] Re: Setup use on win2k - a me too ...

[Pavel Tsekov]

Christopher Faylor wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 12:11:06AM +1100, Robert Collins wrote:
> >On Wed, 2001-11-07 at 00:04, Pavel Tsekov wrote:
> >> Btw what is done in state.cc is a bad habbit, IMO.
> >
> >Yes. It's C style, not CPP style.
> >
> >I'll approve this if you do a patch and Changelog.
> >
> >NULL for everything is correct - source should be 0, as should
> >net_method etc. the current code has checks for 0/NULL, but not for
> >random values :].
> >
> >And trust_level should be deleted if not used.
> 
> It is not a bad habit to rely on global variables being 0.  If they
> aren't then something is seriously wrong with either 'ld' or the
> run-time the loader.
> 
> The linux kernel developers have actually been removing explicit
> initialization to zero from most of their globals and statics.  I've
> been doing the same thing inside of the DLL.  It creates a smaller
> executable since the variables end up being assigned to the BSS segment
> which is allocated at run-time and is guaranteed to be zero.
> 
> I don't think that gratuitous changes like this are really called for
> unless you can *really* show that global variables are pointing to
> non-zero memory.  If that is the case then we need to figure out how
> that could possibly be the case.

I didn't know this actually, so I thought it may the cause for the
problem.
In fact I now remember that I red in the "Design & Implentation of 4.4
BSD" 
that when the zeroing of BSS was disabled at some stage of the
development
this caused a of lot problems with the available programs and this
feature was
thrown away. However the MSVC compiled programs do not have globals,
except
the static ones, initialized to zero and I was fooled by the fact.

I apologize for this.

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