c - Do I have to call memset after I allocated new memory using malloc

Question

#include "stdlib.h"
#include "stdio.h"
#include "string.h"
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    int *test = malloc(15 * sizeof(int));
    for(int i = 0;i < 15 ;i  ++ )
        printf("test is %i
",test[i]);

    memset(test,0,sizeof(int) * 15);

    for(int i = 0 ; i < 15; i ++ )
        printf("test after memset is %i
",test[i]);

    return 0;
}

The output I get is very weird:

    test is 1142126264
    test is 32526
    ...
    test is 1701409394
    test is 1869348978
    test is 1694498930
    test after memset is 0
    test after memset is 0
    test after memset is 0
    test after memset is 0
    test after memset is 0
    ...
    test after memset is 0
    test after memset is 0
    test after memset is 0
    test after memset is 0
    test after memset is 0

Why would that happen? I thought I just malloced some new fresh memory that is ready to use?

So how about this:

int test[15];

Do I have to call memset(&test,0,sizeof(int) * 15); ?

Answer 1

malloc does not initialize the memory it allocates. You just get whatever random garbage was already in there. If you really need everything set to 0, use calloc at a performance penalty. (If you need to initialize to something other than 0, use memset for byte arrays and otherwise manually loop over the array to initialize it.)