[fpc-pascal] readonly variables

[Micha Nelissen]

Anthony Walter wrote:
> Having said all that, Jonas, what is the actual implemented behaviour
> of FPC? Does it 0 initialize heap memory at startup or not? If not,
> what is the justification for not doing so when this has been a long
> established behaviour of Delphi?

It's not the compiler or RTL that zeroes the memory, but the OS. 
Therefore, it cannot be guaranteed by the fpc documentation (except if 
it would contain code to explicitly initialise that memory).

Most OSes (Windows, Linux, BSDs, ...) do zero global memory though, to 
prevent leakage of (potentially security sensitive) information from one 
process to another.

Micha