Re:IANAPPU
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I've used Purify for years. However, I haven't yet tried valgrind, so I don't know to what degree the free-software competition has caught up. Purify goes well beyond what your average debugging malloc can do. Purify scans your memory for pointers to other blocks of memory, and thus can distinguish between memory in use vs. memory that has been totally leaked (no pointers to it). If you are working with a "dirty" app that allocates a lot of memory at startup and never relases it, that is a huge difference. A debugging malloc can put a guard zone around a block of memory and thus can tell if something has accidently written to the guard zone. Purify inserts code that watches every memory access, so it shows you the exact line of source code that writes to the invalid region and can also spot reads from invalid memory. There is more, but I don't want to sound like a press release:-).
I am not as impressed with their code coverage and profiling stuff, which I've only used a few times in the past. It worked reasonably well when I tried it, but its not as big an advance over standard tools as is Purify.
Re:Commercial post of the day.
by
pthisis
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I guess the main concern should be if Rational can ever break even on a product that took years of development.
Um, no. Rational may break even, but if there's another product that does the same job for cheaper then you can come out ahead. Or even does most of the same job for much cheaper. Suppose Purify cost $5000 and saved $6000 worth of debugging time, while electricfence cost nothing and saved $3000 worth of debugging time from that same $6000. You're better off using efence and spending the $3000 worth of debugging time than dropping $5000 on Purify.
In reality, the free tools as of late have really pulled ahead of purify. Between valgrind, Boehm-Weiser, ElectricFence, and EiC you can accomplish much of what purify can do and a lot that it can't. e.g. Boehm-Weiser can find memory leaks in standard code that wouldn't be found without a lot of legwork by valgrind or Purify. I find the combination of valgrind and boehm-weiser to be much more effective than Purify in practice, and it's free.
Speaking here as a Rational Certified Consultant/Instructor, longtime user of Rational Rose SoDA, ReqPro, ClearQuest, etc, and an employee of one of their closest partners, since when has Rational produced a quality product? Have you used Rose? ReqPro? SoDA?? Granted, I haven't had time really kick the XDE's tires...
About the only somewhat stable product is the RUP, and that's primarily static HTML. I am huge Rational booster, but I won't get caught dead saying that they produce quality products. As the joke goes, wouldn't it be great if Rational only followed their own advice?
Now, on the plus side (since I am a Rational booster), when everything is integrated correctly, no other tools can touch them. The ReqPro->Rose->ClearQuest integration, while limited, allows me as an architect to determine test coverage analysis when correcting defects, releate risks to requirements, and tie the model to the requirements -- allowing me to model visually or textually. It all may be somewhat buggy, but there is no other set of tools out there that allows me to accomplish those tasks so seamlessly.
Re:Commercial post of the day.
by
Tune
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> I find the combination of valgrind and boehm-weiser to be much more effective than Purify in practice, and it's free.
Thanks for the tips. To be honest, I'm really not that much into the code analysis "market", but I probably should have known about these tools.
On a first glance, the tools don't seem to have the "easy-to-use" GUI-appeal that Rational's tools tend to have. Though that's just a front end thing, I guess I'd personally have a hard time convincing my manager to switch to a tools that lacks plug-and-pray features, have no "customer support" and might not support all platforms we're supporting....But since these are all minor issues, you've convinced me to give these tools a try - even if is has to be outside company walls!
> You're better off using efence and spending the $3000 worth of debugging time than dropping $5000 on Purify.
Though I'm not an advocate of closed software, I still think Rational has a good product that is worth its money. To support my previous arguments I could add development time: save two weeks a year and you're ready to sell your product two weeks earlier. Ergo: development costs are covered by revenue two weeks earlier. That's almost 4%. In our case (10 developers, user licenses at $50k-$100k), having your project ready on time is of life importance.
That being said, I'm going to give the stuff you suggested a try - the "free" part in Free Software should be tempting to my manager, and if indeed it's better in finding bugs, I'm in!
Slashdot Mirror
I've used Purify for years. However, I haven't yet tried valgrind, so I don't know to what degree the free-software competition has caught up. Purify goes well beyond what your average debugging malloc can do. Purify scans your memory for pointers to other blocks of memory, and thus can distinguish between memory in use vs. memory that has been totally leaked (no pointers to it). If you are working with a "dirty" app that allocates a lot of memory at startup and never relases it, that is a huge difference. A debugging malloc can put a guard zone around a block of memory and thus can tell if something has accidently written to the guard zone. Purify inserts code that watches every memory access, so it shows you the exact line of source code that writes to the invalid region and can also spot reads from invalid memory. There is more, but I don't want to sound like a press release :-).
I am not as impressed with their code coverage and profiling stuff, which I've only used a few times in the past. It worked reasonably well when I tried it, but its not as big an advance over standard tools as is Purify.
I guess the main concern should be if Rational can ever break even on a product that took years of development.
Um, no. Rational may break even, but if there's another product that does the same job for cheaper then you can come out ahead. Or even does most of the same job for much cheaper. Suppose Purify cost $5000 and saved $6000 worth of debugging time, while electricfence cost nothing and saved $3000 worth of debugging time from that same $6000. You're better off using efence and spending the $3000 worth of debugging time than dropping $5000 on Purify.
In reality, the free tools as of late have really pulled ahead of purify. Between valgrind, Boehm-Weiser, ElectricFence, and EiC you can accomplish much of what purify can do and a lot that it can't. e.g. Boehm-Weiser can find memory leaks in standard code that wouldn't be found without a lot of legwork by valgrind or Purify. I find the combination of valgrind and boehm-weiser to be much more effective than Purify in practice, and it's free.
Sumner
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Speaking here as a Rational Certified Consultant/Instructor, longtime user of Rational Rose SoDA, ReqPro, ClearQuest, etc, and an employee of one of their closest partners, since when has Rational produced a quality product? Have you used Rose? ReqPro? SoDA?? Granted, I haven't had time really kick the XDE's tires ...
About the only somewhat stable product is the RUP, and that's primarily static HTML. I am huge Rational booster, but I won't get caught dead saying that they produce quality products. As the joke goes, wouldn't it be great if Rational only followed their own advice?
Now, on the plus side (since I am a Rational booster), when everything is integrated correctly, no other tools can touch them. The ReqPro->Rose->ClearQuest integration, while limited, allows me as an architect to determine test coverage analysis when correcting defects, releate risks to requirements, and tie the model to the requirements -- allowing me to model visually or textually. It all may be somewhat buggy, but there is no other set of tools out there that allows me to accomplish those tasks so seamlessly.
> I find the combination of valgrind and boehm-weiser to be much more effective than Purify in practice, and it's free.
...But since these are all minor issues, you've convinced me to give these tools a try - even if is has to be outside company walls!
Thanks for the tips. To be honest, I'm really not that much into the code analysis "market", but I probably should have known about these tools.
On a first glance, the tools don't seem to have the "easy-to-use" GUI-appeal that Rational's tools tend to have. Though that's just a front end thing, I guess I'd personally have a hard time convincing my manager to switch to a tools that lacks plug-and-pray features, have no "customer support" and might not support all platforms we're supporting.
> You're better off using efence and spending the $3000 worth of debugging time than dropping $5000 on Purify.
Though I'm not an advocate of closed software, I still think Rational has a good product that is worth its money. To support my previous arguments I could add development time: save two weeks a year and you're ready to sell your product two weeks earlier. Ergo: development costs are covered by revenue two weeks earlier. That's almost 4%. In our case (10 developers, user licenses at $50k-$100k), having your project ready on time is of life importance.
That being said, I'm going to give the stuff you suggested a try - the "free" part in Free Software should be tempting to my manager, and if indeed it's better in finding bugs, I'm in!
They do have a command line tool (attolcc), just search for "command-line" in their documentation.
The showstopper for me was the lack of support for gcc-3.X...