We’ve been working on our next version of our flagship product at work and, as part of that, we upgraded to Visual C++ 8 (2005) and turned on the most strict compiler settings, warning level 4, more debug runtime checks–basically trying to make everything very strict.

As part of that process, we had to go through the code and fix hundreds (thousands?) of warnings that just became errors.

One area was the following:

                 for(i = 0; i < overlaySize.cx; i++) {
                    long i1 = (long)((double)i / numXTimes);
                    double xPercent = (double)i / numXTimes - i1;

                    // get the indeces into the data array
                    long lIndex1 = i1 + (j1 * m_DataSize.cx);
                    long lIndex2 = lIndex1 + m_DataSize.cx;

                    double yVal1, yVal2;
                    if(i1 != oldi1) {
                        yVal1 = m_DataArray[lIndex1] + //etc...

                        yVal2 = m_DataArray[lIndex1 + 1] + //etc...

                        oldi1 = i1;
                    }

                    // figure out the value
                    double theVal = yVal1 + (yVal2 - yVal1) * xPercent;
                }

I’ve of course cut out a number of lines from this loop that weren’t relevant to the point.

The compiler flagged yVal1 and yVal2 as being potentially unitialized before they were used. It’s because they’re initialized inside an if statement.

So to remedy this, I initialized them to 0.0:

double yVal1=0.0, yVal2=0.0;
if(i1 != oldi1) {

//etc.

I go on to fix other warnings-become-errors, and we finally create our first build with VC8 a week or two later. Then, we start having problems in one area of the program. A data file is working on looks horrible, and it’s taking 45 minutes to do the calculations instead of 2-3 seconds. What’s going on? It took a while to find it, but find it I did…

There is a serious bug in the code above, which my initializing the variables hid. The answer next time!