SLAU132V October 2004 – February 2020
In ANSI C, global and static variables that are not explicitly initialized must be set to 0 before program execution. The C/C++ compiler supports preinitialization of uninitialized variables by default. This can be turned off by specifying the linker option --zero_init=off.
Zero initialization takes place only if the --rom_model linker option, which causes autoinitialization to occur, is used. If you use the --ram_model option for linking, the linker does not generate initialization records, and the loader must handle both data and zero initialization.