Re: PATCH: Remove unnecessary zero-initializations

Elena Zannoni
2002-11-11T14:39:53Z

Andrew Cagney writes:
> > Currently, thirteen files which provide a target_ops explicitly initialize
> > members they don't support to NULL. I plan to delete a number of these
> > methods, and rather than making sure I got all the necessary target files
> > each time I just wanted to delete the unnecessary lines up-front. All of
> > these are called-once functions initializing a statically or globally
> > declared object; C will guarantee zero-initialization for us. And several
> > of the functions explicitly called memset anyway.
> >
> > Besides, this way grepping for .to_require_attach\ = will only find targets
> > which define it to something useful.
> >
> > I'll commit this tomorrow unless someone sees a problem with it.
> >
> > Note1: remote-st.c hasn't been compilable in a while; m68*-tandem-* is
> > probably a good candidate for the hitlist. From a glance it looks like it
> > has been broken since the HP merge added the NULL assignments I'm removing,
> > which is about three years now I think.
> >
> > Note2: The DONT_USE member of struct target_ops can go now.
>
> The fact that 13 files were doing it should suggest that it was
> intentional. Might want to wait a bit longer while someone dregs up the
> history.
>
> Andrew
>

I remember a debate about this when the HP merge happened. Basically
the initializations were deemed unnecessary, but they were already in,
and nobody went back to clean them up. I agree with Felix that it
would help with readability if it were done consistently, but it is
not, so probably it makes things worse.

Elena