CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++windowsdebuggingmemory
Isso
Isso

Reputation: 1333

Visual patterns in memory?

Started up remote debugging a C++ project today on a Win 7 machine running in VMWare and was astonished to see the following pattern on a random memory location:

enter image description here

Who might code this (it's not me!) and for what reason?? Just curious if anyone has seen something like this.

Upvotes: 25

Views: 1131

Answers (2)

Dai
Dai

Reputation: 155726

It looks like a rendered mask for a font (each character in a font (typeface+size+style) is rendered once in-memory, then blitted to the output surface) using 8bpp, which suggests you've got font anti-aliasing enabled.

I'm assuming your project involves a GUI, you might be looking at a shared-memory area that GDI uses for storing rasterized fonts.

If not, then this might just be leftover memory from a previous process or OS component that wasn't zeroed before being used by your application.

Upvotes: 21

Jonathan Wood
Jonathan Wood

Reputation: 67355

It's hard to say. Possibly memory used to buffer some fonts (in this case, zeros), or even buffered printer or screen content.

Upvotes: 6

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