Re: /* compiler workaround */ - what was the issue?

> On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 4:41 AM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>> "Philip Oakley" <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:
>>
>>>     int saved_namelen = saved_namelen; /* compiler workaround */
>>>
>>> Which then becomes an MSVC compile warning C4700: uninitialized local
>>> variable.
>>>
>>> I'm wondering what was the compiler workaround being referred to? i.e. 
>>> why
>>> does it need that tweak? There's no mention of the reason in the commit
>>> message.
>>
>> That was a fairly well-known workaround for GCC that issues a false
>> warning that variable is used before initialized.  I thought we
>> stopped using it several years ago in new code after doing a bulk
>> sanitizing
>
> I guess that's 803a777 (cat-file: Fix an gcc -Wuninitialized warning -
> 2013-03-26) and more commits around that time. The split-index commit
> is in 2014. I must have missed the trend.
>
>> (I think the new recommended workaround was to initialise
>> such a variable to the nil value like '0' for integers).
>
> Yep. First Jeff removed the " = xxx" part from "xxx = xxx" then Ramsay
> added the " = NULL" back. So we probably just do "int saved_namelen =
> 0;" in this case.
> --