[matklad]

Oh, important clarification from andrewrk(https://lobste.rs/c/tf6jng), which I totally missed myself: this isn't actually a dereference of uninitialized pointer, it's a defer of a pointer which is explicitly set to a specific, invalid value.

[jrpelkonen]

This is indeed an important point, the way I originally understood the bug was that the memory was not initialized at all. Thanks for the clarification

[kiitos]

well, per the zig spec, any program that relies on that "explicitly set [and] specific" value of 0xAA isn't valid, so it's absolutely a bug