Re: Pseudovectors initialization

[Dmitry Antipov]

On 06/26/2012 04:33 PM, Michael Welsh Duggan wrote:

> Is it really safe to memset to zero that which should default to Qnil?

No, of course.

All pseudo-vector objects has tricky layout:

pseudo_vector {
  vectorlike_header;
  Lisp_Object A;       |
  ...                  | area visible by GC
  Lisp_Object Z;       |
  non_lisp_object a;      |
  ...                     | area invisible for GC
  non_lisp_object z;      |
};

Everything from area visible by GC is initialized to Qnil by
allocate_pseudovector, and ALLOCATE_PSEUDOVECTOR knows how to
evaluate this area's size. This patch zeroes just the rest,
i.e. area invisible for GC.

Dmitry