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advanced patterns When Using Uninitialized Variables in Structs in C

👀 Views: 56 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-11
c structs initialization C

I'm working on a personal project and Does anyone know how to This might be a silly question, but I'm experiencing unexpected behavior when accessing uninitialized variables within a struct in C... I have a struct that holds a few integer values, and I assumed that if I didn't explicitly initialize them, they would default to zero. However, I'm seeing random values when I try to access these members. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```c #include <stdio.h> typedef struct { int x; int y; } Point; void printPoint(Point p) { printf("Point: (%d, %d)\n", p.x, p.y); } int main() { Point p; printPoint(p); // Accessing uninitialized struct members return 0; } ``` When I run this code, the output is something like `Point: (32767, -2147483648)` which is clearly not what I expected. I thought that the `x` and `y` values should default to zero since I didn't initialize them. I've tried modifying the struct to include an initializer like this: ```c Point p = {0}; ``` This did fix the question, and now it prints `Point: (0, 0)`, but I want to understand why uninitialized variables lead to random values in the first place. Is this behavior specific to certain compilers or environments? How can I ensure I'm following best practices to avoid such issues in the future? I'm using GCC version 10.2 on Linux. Any insights would be greatly appreciated! For context: I'm using C on macOS. I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. This is happening in both development and production on macOS. What would be the recommended way to handle this? I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. The project is a service built with C. I appreciate any insights!