I didn't say it was always the programmers' fault. But I believe the programmer should express their intent as clearly as possible. And memset( (void*)buf, 0, buflen ) says fill-a-contiguous-array-of-unsigned-chars-of-value-zero, which is semantically different from initializing an array of structs that may have padding, and better matches the programmers' intent. It doesn't matter if the zero value is all 0 bits or not - the important thing is that the whole contiguous memory region is zeroed.

I believe C99 says chars and unsigned chars have no padding.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13929462/can-the-unsigne...