slide_hash knowingly reads (possibly) uninitialised memory, see comment
lower down about prev[n] potentially being garbage. In this case, the
result is never used - so we don't care about MSAN complaining about
this read.
By adding the no_sanitize("memory") attribute, clients of zlib won't
see this (unnecessary) error when building and running with
MemorySanitizer. An alternative approach is for clients to build zlib
with -fsanitize-ignorelist=... where the ignorelist contains something
like 'fun:slide_hash'. But that's more work and needs to be redone
for any and all CI systems running a given project with MSAN. Adding
this annotation to zlib's sources is overall more convenient - but
also won't affect non-MSAN builds.
This specific issue was found while running git's test suite, but has
also been reported by other clients, see e.g. #518.
