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Bounds Checking for Open Source Code?

Posted by Cliff on from the preventing-those-off-by-one-errors dept.

roarl asks: "Is anyone working on an Open Source bounds checking system? (A system that checks a program at runtime for array out of bounds access, reading uninitialized memory, memory leaks and so on). I've been using BoundsChecker for some time and believe me, there are situations where you know you are going to spend hours debugging unless you let BoundsChecker sort it out for you. But it annoys me that I have to transfer (and sometimes port) the buggy program to Windows each time. I'd much rather stay in Linux. Insure works on Linux. I haven't tried Insure for some time, but last time I tried I wasn't especially impressed. Purify seems still not to support Linux, but on other Unix platforms it works great. The problem with all of these products is that they are so da*n expensive. So it makes me wonder, are all Open Source programmers doing without them? If so, what can we expect of the quality of Open Source developed programs? If not, is there a free alternative?"

2 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Change languages. by rjh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Warning: I'm a language zealot, so be warned that I'm utterly irrational and unamenable to the Sweet Voice of Reason. That said... :)

    Use a different language. There are some things which C is appropriate for, but one of the things it's categorically not called for is when you have concerns about buffer-overflow conditions [*]. If this is a purely open-source, noncommercial project, do yourself and your career a favor: learn another language (one which doesn't have these sorts of problems) and write your app in that instead. You'll learn more, and you won't have to spend a dime on Purify or whatnot. If you go this route, I'd suggest Scheme; it's a beautiful LISP derivative.

    If this is a commercial project, ask Management how married they are to C. In the overwhelming majority of cases, you can quietly substitute C++ without affecting the APIs one bit. Just wrap the external APIs in extern "C" and, inside the code, use C++'s beautiful vector instead of C-style arrays. Sure, you'll take a minor performance hit, but the increase in reliability will be well worth it.

    Anyway, to try and give a (weak) answer to your question--instead of slapping a Band-Aid on the festering wound that is C memory management, you might want to think about doing away with the festering wound altogether. Use the right tool for the job--if C really is the right tool for the job, then fine, may God have mercy on your code. But if there are other, better, tools available... use them instead.

    [*] OpenBSD manages to do pretty well with a C kernel, but that's because they're certifiably insane. It also impacts their dev cycle; they spend a great deal of time avoiding the pitfalls of C, so much so that it affects how much time they can devote to new development.

  2. STL by j_kenpo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    IMHO, you should do a mix of C and C++ and use the Standard Template Librarys vector, deque, or list classes instead of an array. Hell, even if you use an array, the STL functions and algorithms still work on them. You can even use the Queue and Stack wrappers if thats what your doing... Thats just my opinion though....