5

Possible Duplicate:
Why do I see strange values when I print uninitialized variables?
Fun with uninitialized variables and compiler (GCC)

I want to know about a mysterious problem which I faced while solving a code issue.

The code which is present in production has an uninitialized boolean variable and a library is checking the value of this boolean. In LIVE site, this variable is behaving as TRUE always The same code in development environment is behaving as FALSE always.

I know, due to the environment difference between LIVE & DEV, an uninitialized bool variable can have an undefined value.

But here is my issue.

If I put a log statement in the code, compile it and put the binary in development environment, the bool variable is having TRUE always, whereas it was FALSE with the code in LIVE.

How does a log statement affect the value of an uninitialized bool variable? I would like to know the possibilities.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
cppcoder
  • 22,227
  • 6
  • 56
  • 81
  • 2
    possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4879045/fun-with-uninitialized-variables-and-compiler-gcc http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2154132/printing-an-uninitialized-bool-using-cout-c – Ashish Kasma Mar 29 '12 at 05:43

2 Answers2

14

An uninitialiazed variable is just a piece of raw memory and will show as value whatever happes to be there. You idea that "In the live system it always happens to be true" is totally wrong. All you can say is that every time you observed it in the live system it seemed to be true. May be on next Tuesday instead it will happen to be false because it's well known that uninitialized bools hate tuesdays.

Note that's even entirely possible that an uninitialized boolean may seem true for one function and false for another (normally a full byte is allocated for a bool, but only a bit is needed to represent the value: it's possible that an uninitialized bool will contain a magic fuzzy bool value that it's true for someone and false for someone else).

As for what the standard says accessing an uninitialized variable for reading may indeed be undefined behavior, with no limits on what may happen including crashes (and for example is easy to have a program to "stop" when reading an uninitialized variable, just compile with a specific tool for tracking this kind of problem). Always having a program crash on accessing an uninitialized variable would be wonderful, but unfortunately it's quite costly on current CPUs and it's not going to happen unless specific tools are used.

Of course adding even just a printf call can change the apparent behavior of code handling uninitialized variables. This kind of bug is often referred to as "heisenbug" and actually the random or heisenbug behavior is often an indication of an uninitialized variable or of a thread synchronization problem.

6502
  • 112,025
  • 15
  • 165
  • 265
2

You stated:

an uninitialized bool variable can have an undefined value.

In reality, that should be: "an uninitialized bool variable always has an undefined value."

Just because your value is changing doesn't change the fact that it's undefined. The only guarantee in the behavior is what is defined by the specifications. As long as it's not defined with a static storage definition, the behavior is exactly that: undefined. The compiler is free to do anything it wants with this variable - it may initialize it, it may not, it may optimize it away completely if it's not being logged (ie: used), etc.

Basically, you need to initialize your bool correctly, and you can not worry about it.

Reed Copsey
  • 554,122
  • 78
  • 1,158
  • 1,373
  • I know its always undefined. But I would like to know why a minor change can affect its value. Its always false in dev environment, until I do a minor change and recompile. – cppcoder Mar 29 '12 at 05:52
  • It's *undefined*. *Anything* you do could cause the compiler to generate a program with different results and not necessarily any obvious reason at all. – Mark B Mar 29 '12 at 05:56