Should Local Variable Initialisation Be Mandatory?

Question

The maintenance problems that uninitialised locals cause (particularly pointers) will be obvious to anyone who has done a bit of c/c++ maintenance or enhancement, but I still se

Answer 1

It should be mostly mandatory. The reason for this has nothing to do with performance but rather the danger of using an unitialized variable. However, there are cases where it simply looks ridiculous. For example, I have seen:

struct stat s;
s.st_dev = -1;
s.st_ino = -1;
s.st_mode = S_IRWXU;
s.st_nlink = 0;
s.st_size = 0;
// etc...
s.st_st_ctime = -1;
if(stat(path, &s) != 0) {
   // handle error
   return;
}

WTF???

Note that we are handling the error right away, so there is no question about what happens if the stat fails.