Skip to content

Memset Initialisation Error

Summary

  • memset can't be used to initialise int array with 1, an array of int can only be initialised with 0 or -1 using memset

Lessons Learned

Therefore, memset cannot be used to initialise an int array with 1 because if an int is represented by 4 bytes, then memset will initialise each byte with 1.

The value 16843009 is equivalent to 0x01010101. Each of the 4 bytes is initialised with 01.

Using memset, an array of int can only be initialised with 0 or -1 because 0 and -1 both have all bits 0 and 1 respectively in the two's complement binary representation, regardless of the size of the int data type.

Reference URL