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

Just a secondary observation. Initializations are only EASILY optimized on primitive types or when assigned by const functions.

a= foo();

a= foo2();

Cannot be easily optimized because foo may have side effects.

Also heap allocations before time might result in huge performance hits. Take a code like

void foo(int x)

{

ClassA *instance= new ClassA();

//... do something not "instance" related... if(x>5) {

delete instance;

return;

}

//.. do something that uses instance

}

On that case, simply declare instance just when you will use it, and initialize it only there. And no The compiler Cannot optimize that for you since the constructor may have side effects that code reordering would change.

edit: I fail at using the code listing feature :P