Comment by Calavar
1 day ago
I would guess a lot. People aren't intimately familiar with the standard, and people are lazy when it comes to writing boilerplate like initialization code. And up until now, it just worked, so even a good test suite wouldn't catch it.
EDIT: I initially mentioned type punning for arithmetic, but this compiler change wouldn't affect that
How would that be broken by this? The union will be zero initialized regardless because this change only affects situations where the union members are of different lengths, but for integer to float, the union members should always be the same length or bad things will happen.
I realized my mistake and I think I edited my comment a split second before you replied, but you're right. That particular type punning scenario wouldn't be affected by this change because 1) the members are the same size, so there's no padding bits 2) the specific union member is going to be initialized to the input parameter, not with the syntax sugar for aggregate zero initialization.
Well, under your original version, I could see someone filling in bit fields in the float like the exponent and sign while leaving the mantissa zeroed, but given that the integer and float would be the same length, there is no section that would be left uninitialized by this change.
In order for this change to leave something uninitialized, you would need to have a member of the union after the first member that is longer than the first member. Code that does that and relies on {0} to zero the union seems incredibly rare to me.