# Help me understand vector initialization

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-me-understand-vector-initialization/93129>\
**Category:** Performance\
**Created:** [January 18, 2023, 5:15am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-me-understand-vector-initialization/93129 "2023-01-18T05:15:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 8\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![udax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/a587f6/32.png) [@udax](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/udax)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2023, 5:15am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-me-understand-vector-initialization/93129/1 "2023-01-18T05:15:02Z")

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Here is a MWE of a problem that I am facing. In method 1, the array “arr” gets initialized correctly, but it seems very inelegant. In the second method, the array “brr” often does not get initialized correctly.

```julia
for k = 1:100
    local i = 3
    local arr = Vector{Float64}(undef, i)
    local brr = Vector{Float64}(undef, i)
    for j = 1:i
        arr[j] = 0
    end
    brr .*= 0 #<- this should have worked but doesn't
    arr[i] = 1
    brr[i] = 1
    if all(isfinite, arr) == false || all(isfinite, brr) == false
        print("$arr v/s $brr \n")
    end
end

```

On average, about 4 times out of 100, the output is like so:

> [0.0, 0.0, 1.0] v/s [NaN, 0.0, 1.0]

What’s going on here?

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**Author:** ![Oscar\_Smith](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/oscar_smith/32/25343_2.png) [@Oscar\_Smith](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Oscar_Smith)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2023, 5:18am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-me-understand-vector-initialization/93129/2 "2023-01-18T05:18:34Z")

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you want `brr .= 0` `NaN*0==NaN`.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![udax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/a587f6/32.png) [@udax](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/udax)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2023, 5:30am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-me-understand-vector-initialization/93129/3 "2023-01-18T05:30:28Z")

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Thanks very much!

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**Author:** ![Salmon](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/salmon/32/22968_2.png) [@Salmon](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Salmon)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2023, 6:28am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-me-understand-vector-initialization/93129/4 "2023-01-18T06:28:48Z")

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While there is nothing wrong with the other answer, I think it is rare that you’d want to really use the undef initializer. Bugs coming from a slightly wrong use of undef initializers can occur infrequently (because more often than not, the memory will be full of zeros), they can fail very silently and are in general hard to reproduce and debug.  
Perhaps, the `zeros` function is not suitable for your actual use can but perhaps, `fill(0,i) `is?. 0 can of course be interchanges with basically anything.  
This way of initialization, along with array comprehensions have completely replaces my use of undef initializers.  
Not saying that there can never be a use case, but it always eases my mind when I manage to avoid such pitfalls.

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**Author:** ![juthohaegeman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/juthohaegeman/32/8620_2.png) [@juthohaegeman](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/juthohaegeman)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2023, 8:54am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-me-understand-vector-initialization/93129/5 "2023-01-18T08:54:45Z")

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> [@Oscar\_Smith](#):
>
> you want `brr .= 0` `NaN*0==NaN`.

One of the issues with the `0 * NaN` behaviour is that BLAS methods don’t tend to respect this, i.e.  
`LinearAlgebra.BLAS.scal!(0., x)`  
eliminates possible `NaN` values in `x`. I thought it used to be the case that this BLAS method was called by more intrinsic Julia methods like `LinearAlgebra.lmul!`, but this seems to be no longer the case, as this method does preserve the `NaN`s correctly. However, doing something like `LinearAlgebra.axpy!(0., x, y)` where `x` contains `NaN`s will still discard those and not propagate them into `y`.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![udax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/a587f6/32.png) [@udax](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/udax)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2023, 10:28am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-me-understand-vector-initialization/93129/6 "2023-01-18T10:28:54Z")

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Thanks for your note. Yes, `fill` works; specifically, `fill!(brr,0.0)` does the job on an existing array and `brr = fill(0.0,i)` to initialize a new array. Not sure about the difference in performance, though. Yes, the `zeros` function doesn’t work for me because of how I use the array next (passing it as an argument to the `ChebyshevT` function) which wants a vector, not Matrix, as input.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![sostock](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/sostock/32/5546_2.png) [@sostock](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/sostock)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2023, 10:45am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-me-understand-vector-initialization/93129/7 "2023-01-18T10:45:40Z")

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> [@udax](#):
>
> Yes, the `zeros` function doesn’t work for me because of how I use the array next (passing it as an argument to the `ChebyshevT` function) which wants a vector, not Matrix, as input.

Why would `zeros` not be able to create a `Vector`?

```julia
julia> zeros(5)
5-element Vector{Float64}:
 0.0
 0.0
 0.0
 0.0
 0.0

julia> zeros(Int, 5)
5-element Vector{Int64}:
 0
 0
 0
 0
 0

```

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![udax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/a587f6/32.png) [@udax](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/udax)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2023, 11:01am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/help-me-understand-vector-initialization/93129/8 "2023-01-18T11:01:50Z")

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Ah yes, that works too. As you can tell, I am new to Juila, coming from a MATLAB background, where `zeros(n)` gives a square matrix of size `n x n`. Thanks for pointing this out.