Easy way find uninitialized member variables

If you use GCC you can use the -Weffc++ flag, which generates a warnings when a variable isn't initialized in the member initialisation list. This:

class Foo { int v; Foo() {} }; 

Leads to:

$ g++ -c -Weffc++ foo.cpp -o foo.o foo.cpp: In constructor ‘Foo::Foo()’: foo.cpp:4: warning: ‘Foo::v’ should be initialized in the member initialization list 

One downside is that -Weffc++ will also warn you when a variable has a proper default constructor and initialisation thus wouldn't be necessary. It will also warn you when you initialize a variable in the constructor, but not in the member initialisation list. And it warns on many other C++ style issues, such as missing copy-constructors, so you might need to clean up your code a bit when you want to use -Weffc++ on a regular basis.

There is also a bug that causes it to always give you a warning when using anonymous unions, which you currently can't work around other then switching off the warning, which can be done with:

#pragma GCC diagnostic ignored "-Weffc++" 

Overall however I have found -Weffc++ to be incredible useful in catching lots of common C++ mistakes.

cppcheck will find this, e.g.:

cppcheck my_src_dir --output-file=check.txt --inconclusive --enable=warning 

Valgrind (FREE, on Linux) and Purify (on Windows) find un-initialized variables, invalid pointers and such by running your code in a special virtual machine.

This is easy to use and extremely powerful; it will likely find many bugs beyond the obvious un-initialized variables.

Coverity, Klocwork and Lint can find un-initialized variables using static code analysis.

Valgrind can tell you if you are on linux.

-Wuninitialized ?

(This only checks if a variable is used uninitialized, i.e. if

struct Q { int x, y; Q() : x(2) {} int get_xy() const { return x*y; } }; 

g++ will warn only when the user calls get_xy() without assigning to y.)

If you're using Visual Studio, you could compile in debug mode, stop the program in the debugger and look for which variables are initialised to bytes containing 0xCC (stack) or 0xCD (heap).

Though personally, I'd invest in a static analysis tool for a more thorough approach.

Visual Studio (MSVC) has a /sdl (Enable Additional Security Checks) compiler option (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj161081.aspx). At run-time, it:

Performs class member initialization. Automatically initializes class members of pointer type to zero on object instantiation (before the constructor runs). This helps to prevent use of uninitialized data associated with class members that the constructor does not explicitly initialize.

This will not help you detect uninitialized member variables at compile-time, but it makes the behaviour more predictable when it happens at run-time. You shouldn't write code that relies on this option being enabled though, of course.

/analyze on Visual Studio ("Team System")

Beware! Compiler options proposed here are neither reliable, nor version-independent. Consider the simple example:

class A { int a; public: void mA() { printf("haha"); ++a; int g = 2/a; printf("%i\n",g); } }; int main() { A a; a.mA(); } 

Compiled with g++ -O3 -Weffc++ -Wuninitialized this thing reports uninitialized on gcc versions up to 4.6 inclusive, and passess happily on 4.7 and 4.8 (tested on MacPorts). Then, curiously, if we remove the printf("haha");, both 4.7 and 4.8 suddenly see uninitialized A::a. Clang is a little better, since it somehow assigns rubbish (instead of convenient 0) to uninitialized vars, so you see their disastrous effect easier/sooner.

I didn't have much luck in spotting the above uninitialized A::a with valgrind either; maybe the gentlement suggesting valgrind could provide appropriate options to spot this error.

Bottom line: great question, not much reliable solutions at the moment... (the way I see it).

Clang with clang-analyze is able to do this. It will event create a nice HTML report that indicates when the unused variable is accessed.

Consider the following code

unint.cpp:

int main() { int a; int b; a++; b = b + 5; return 0; } 

If the code is compiled with following comment, the warning messages shall be displayed.

g++ -O3 -Wuninitialized unint.cpp

Note: the -Wuninitialized needs the -O3 option also.