YAMAMOTO Takashi wrote:

>what i don't understand here is, why you think NULL initialization is
>better wrt future bugs.
>  
>
Would a dereference of the NULL ptr not cause immediate failure?  As 
opposed to dereference of garbage ptr which may or may not fail 
immediately? and in such a case potentially corrupt some other (possibly 
unrelated) memory which would lead to a fault/crash later that were 
harder to trace back to the original bad dereference?

Maybe this is userland thinking and things are different in the kernel.

>as it's impossible to predict what kind of bugs we'll have here,
>i don't think you can say the change will help or hurt.
>  
>
Agreed, but I think if things were assigned to known values before 
conditional expressions involving them it can avoid accidents.

Tyler