I disagree with this author on both counts. 1. Zero filling is theoretically unnecessary, yes. But theory is not often reality. Zero filling is a defensive measure that protects you from other code that makes unhealthy assumptions. Code external to yours may make assumptions about what lies in your padding, either by doing memcmp's, or adding new fields in a later version of the struct and intending it to be ABI compatible between modules. I'll prefer safe and evolvable code over your nitpick about how it's initialized, thank you very much. 2. Consider yourself lucky that you only use free() in your code. In more complex code bases, custom allocators are used. They do not always follow the same semantics as are dictated for free(). Maybe instead of saying "this perfectly valid thing drives me nuts", ask why people do it. It's not because they don't know better.