When should SecureZeroMemory() be used?

Question

I found some sample code that looks like:

addrinfo hints;
SecureZeroMemory(&hints, sizeof(hints));

Is there a reason to use SecureZeroM

Answer 1

From MSDN:

Use this function instead of ZeroMemory when you want to ensure that your data will be overwritten promptly, as some C++ compilers can optimize a call to ZeroMemory by removing it entirely.

Additionally a simple assignment, w/o a barrier, may be cached by hardware and not make it to the RAM for long time. Or a local variable may be optimized away. SecureZeroMemory makes sure none of that happens.

As to why use for initializing addrinfo, a clearly non-security related concern, beats me.