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I'm not familiar with writing code to wipe memory, but couldn't you just use volatile keyword? Volatile writes are not supposed to be optimized away, and pointe

I'm not familiar with writing code to wipe memory, but couldn't you just use volatile keyword? Volatile writes are not supposed to be optimized away, and pointers to non-volatile types can be cast to pointers to volatile types. Edit: Actually looking at your link closer (too many #defines makes my eyes glaze over), it looks like the final else branch appears to use volatile like I mentioned. I assume all the branches above it are optimizations for different systems?

holy_city 7y ago
Volatile is a hacky way to avoid optimizations and plays hell with normal language semantics. For example, you can't memcpy or memset volatile pointers or pointers to volatiles. Imo if you don't want the compiler to optimize something, tell it not to. For example in GCC: __attribute__((optimize("-O0"), noinline)) void zero_memory(void* memory, size_t sz) { memset(memory, 0, sz); } If you wanted to make that portable, there are equivalents in clang and msvc so you'd want to use some #defines here and there. Of course disabling optimizations/inlining in functions has a performance hit, but I think if you're so concerned with code being ignored the tradeoff is appropriate.