out of curiousity, does this address [any of] the issues involving locales under the perl testsuite?
I don't know what those issues are, so no clue.
build perl then 'gmake check'
see illumos@ 27/07/2015 "perl 5.22 (32 bit , 64bitint) tests failures"
Based on the mailing list thread you mentioned, I thought this unlikely. However, it does affect the '../lib/locale.t' tests, although not in a good way: now we get a segfault before running all the tests. I have C test case for this (it's in strxfrm), and I need to investigate.
There's no reason to obfuscate the initializer that way, is there?
I think you're right. DragonFly did it this way; the intent is to zero the entire length of the buffer, but it looks like that will happen with the string literal initializer as well. I'll change it.