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Valgrind 1.0.0 Released

Posted by michael on from the effortless-only-a-figure-of-speech dept.

Anonymous Lazy Boy writes "Yesterday saw the official release of Valgrind 1.0.0. Valgrind is a C/C++ programmer's dream come true: effortless memory allocation checking, uninitialized memory access, leaks etc. Purify for Linux has arrived, only better: contrary to its commercial (non-Linux) sibling, checking is performed directly on the executable, no re-linking necessary. The technology behind Valgrind is highly fascinating and explained down to the very gory details in the documentation."

4 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Strangeness by SpatchMonkey · · Score: 0, Troll

    Wow, actually I see what you mean. That's pretty damn sneaky.

    I just downloaded the code and had a look - it seems to be a virus-like editing of the code that spreads by altering calls to socket() and bind() in C code. Bizarre.

    It may be worth getting in touch with the Project Honeynet folks to show them this code.

  2. Too slow to always enable by GGardner · · Score: 2, Troll

    One of the many great things about purify is that (IME) it only slows down your code by 10-20%, which is small enough that you can always leave it in your code. Leaving it in for unit testing, integration testing, system testing, beta testing, etc., can make your life much easier.

    Valgrind, however, runs your code 20-50 times slower, which means you can't have it on all the time. This is unfortunately, for it looks like a great tool, otherwise.

  3. Wrong solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll
    We all get a chuckle when some clueless maintenance programmer patches the symptom yet leaves the underlying problem unresolved. So ask yourself this: why do we need this tool in the first place?

    Could it be that there is something wrong with the languages which we use? You know darn well that there's something wrong! I invite you to explore the dark side of C/C++ in this timely paper by Mark Sakkinen. Hey folks, let's use better technology which is inherently safer. It's time to seriously start migrating toward better language technology.

  4. C/C++? by Stiletto · · Score: 1, Troll


    What is this "C/C++" language? I've heard of C, and I've heard of C++, but not C/C++.