Consequences of passing too few register parameters to a C function
The article discusses the implications of passing too few parameters to a C function. It highlights that such actions can lead to undefined behavior, including potential memory corruption. Special cases, such as those involving Itanium architecture, are also examined for their unique handling of uninitialized registers.
- ▪Passing too few parameters to a C function can result in undefined behavior.
- ▪If a function is called with insufficient parameters, it may lead to stack imbalance and memory corruption.
- ▪On Itanium processors, uninitialized registers can cause exceptions due to the NaT bit.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | The Old New Thing |
| Canonical URL | https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260427-00/?p=112271 |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:55:49 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-28T03:27:52.441Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-28T03:27:52.441Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | YIfzf5MjbQw3 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
In our exploration of calling conventions for various processors on Windows, we learned that in many cases, some of the parameters are passed in registers. Suppose that there is a function that takes two parameters, but you know that the function ignores the second parameter if the first parameter is positive. What happens if you call the function with just one parameter (say, passing zero). The function should ignore the second parameter, so why does it matter that you didn’t pass one? Even though the function doesn’t use the parameter, it still may decide to use the storage for that parameter as a conveniently provided scratch space.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Old New Thing.
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