User blog comment:Deedlit11/Bignum Bakeoff appetizer/@comment-24061664-20140915184506/@comment-5529393-20140915195257

This does not seem to be the case for C, for example see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uninitialized_variable

I'm trying to run your program by replacing 9 with 1 or 2, but either way I get a segmentation fault. Have you been able to verify your program for smaller inputs?