Toying around with Clang's "scan-build" static analyzer and found this dead assignment. If its meant to be a "zero out", the C/C++ specs state its up to the compiler to decide what to do with it. So by observing the "bits = 0" does nothing, it will just remove it from output.
The bits is removed as the function is about to return.
Tests passing.
Below is screenshot of scan-build logging the error:
Thanks! That's indeed a dead store and it's meant as a zero-out but of course it doesn't work. This will be fixed by https://github.com/bitcoin-core/secp256k1/pull/636/files#diff-9d23f46e6342836fd7b34eaac40b4ada as soon as rebase this (hopefully soon). Until then, I'd personally to prefer to keep this line as a reminder unless there is another good reason to remove it.
Oooh nice, I didn’t catch that PR yep sounds good. 👌