Question about memset

According to link, memset accepts an int for the value to be set. Why an int, if memset set each byte in the buffer?

I can only imagine that memcpy tries to optimize by copying 4 bytes at a time.

Thanks.

The reason for taking an int is probably hysterical^Whistorical - someone wrote it that way a long time ago, and it's still that way.

It really doesn't make much difference, the value is either passed on the stack as a 4-byte aligned value (in a 32-bit processor), or it is passed in a register. Either way, a unsigned char or some such would take up the same resource (memory or register).

Any decision to optimize it by writing multiple bytes at a time is purely internal to memset, and completely irrelevant to what parameters it takes.

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Mats

I am asking this because I never paid attention to this paramter. But recently I saw that a developer in my team changed memset call in a legacy code that I am working from:

Code:

memset(buff, 0xFF, size)

To:

Code:

memset(buff, 0xFFFFFFFF, size)

Which seems pointless...

That will have no effect on the actual content in buff at all - both will do the same thing.

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Mats