DDD

[mcmanus at AppliedTheory.com (Patrick McManus)]

In a previous episode Glenn Burkhardt said...
:: 
:: The 'dmalloc' package appears to be maintained currently - there's a 3/11/99
:: release.
:: 
:: Electric Fence sounds interesting, too.  It uses the memory mapping hardware
:: to catch bad accesses.
:: 

I've used them both.. electric fence is a classic from bruce perens
and it does a really excellent job at finding under/over runs in your
code.. but it falls down on anything that is relatively big or memory
intensive (trapping all those calls).. but it's astonishingly easy to
use, so if you've got a piece of code that's behaving eratically, its
almost always worth the effort to link in efence and run it again to
see if you can get a deterministic seg fault from it.. as a matter of
fact it's a standard option in the skeleton makefiles we use for all
our projects at work.

dmalloc isn't as good at fidning mem errors in my opinion.. but it is
invaluable for finding leaks.. absolutely invaluable. A little harder
to work with, and it too falls down on bigger projects (though goes a
little farther than efence)..

both of them, however, pale compared to things that can insturment
binaries like sun workshop on solaris and atom/third degree on Digital
Unix. (or almost anything from pure atria.. particularly under NT.)
Anybody know of something like that on linux?

-P
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