Should I initialize unreal structs?

Development Programming & Scripting C++
1

Hi! I am having lots of FStructs with all kind of data like


UPROPERTY()
TArray

UPROPERTY()
bool

and all works perfect so far. I just define them in header, and use on demand, with no additional initializing routines or constructors.

But somewhere deep within I hear voices ‘always initialize everything, or this might get filled up with garbage memory sometime and crash’

Am I being paranoid?

2

Yes, it is a good practice, for some reason in unreal if you left numeric values inside a struct without initialize, you will get funny behaviors, an int32 with 65535 instead of 0, stuff like that

3

Integers filling with some data is OK and expected behavior, but will it ever lead to some crashes, like TArray becoming corrupted? I am just being lazy, wonder if I can get away with it =)

4

You should always initialize everything. Don’t rely on Unreal to do it for you.

5

Non-primitives like TArray are always initialized automatically, but simple values like ints, floats or pointers might be filled with garbage.