> Let's say I'm the implementation. If I go get fresh (but not zeroed) memory from the OS to put my stack on, the garbage in there isn't state of the program, r

> Let's say I'm the implementation. If I go get fresh (but not zeroed) memory from the OS to put my stack on, the garbage in there isn't state of the program, right? I'd argue that once you get the memory it's now part of the state of your program, which precludes it from being involved in whatever value you end up reading from the variable(s) corresponding to that memory. > If I want a fixed init value per address, is that allowed as a hardening feature or disallowed as being based on allocation patterns? I'd guess that that specific implementation would be disallowed, but as I'm an internet nobody I'd take that with an appropriately-sized grain of salt. > And would that mean there's still no way to say "Don't waste time initializing it, but don't do any UB shenanigans either. (Basically, pretend it was initialized by a random number generator.)" I feel like you'd need something like LLVM's `freeze` intrinsic for that kind of functionality.