Valgrind memory debugger 1.0.0 [LWN.net]

Developer Julian Seward has released version 1.0.0 of the Valgrind memory debugger for x86-GNU/Linux with the following inspirational note:

Programmers! Make your software Valgrind-clean. Test it with Valgrind and fix all problems Valgrind reports. This will give you some assurance that your code is free of a broad class of memory management errors. You may well find undiscovered bugs, and your code will probably be more stable as a result. It's good for your code, good for you and especially it's good for the people who use your code.

By intercepting a number of memory related system calls, Valgrind can detect the following problems:

The use of uninitialised memory.
Reading and writing of freed memory after it has been free'd
Reading and writing past the end of malloced memory.
Reading and writing of inappropriate areas on the stack.
Memory leaks involving lost pointers to malloced blocks.
The passing of uninitialized and/or unaddressible memory to system calls.
The mismatched use of malloc/new/new and free/delete/delete.
Some possible misuses of the POSIX pthreads API.

Valgrind is supposed to be able to check any dynamically-linked ELF x86 executable, without modification or recompilation, and it can fire up GDB when errors are encountered. Valgrind also has built-in cache profiling, which can be useful for enhancing the performance of code.

The current 1.0.0 release has undergone a feature-freeze testing phase and it is considered to be stable code at this point. It has successfully been used to check a number of large applications such as KDE3, Mozilla, OpenOffice, and MySQL, to name a few applications. See the Valgrind user manual for the full documentation. Valgrind has been released under the GPL license.

to post comments

Try it!

Posted Aug 1, 2002 9:17 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

I have used the pre-1.0.0 versions of Valgrind, and found them
quite useful and impressively stable for beta software. Seward is clearly
one of the rare programmers who puts a very high priority on quality, and Valgrind
is a tool that helps others aim for the same. I have tried many other
memory testers, both commercial and noncommercial, but Valgrind has
some unique capabilities that none of the competition have.
If you program in C or C++ on Linux/x86, do yourself and especially
your users a favour, and start using Valgrind today!

Use Eiffel

Posted Aug 1, 2002 18:24 UTC (Thu) by gorg_H (guest, #158) [Link] (1 responses)

Eiffel is designed to write applications without worry about garbage or pointers, and it's object-oriented. So, if you use Eiffel, you don't need this program.

links:

smalleiffel.loria.fr (SmallEiffel) -- this is GNU
www.eiffel.com (ISE Eiffel) -- propietary, but powerful IDE

Use Eiffel

Posted Aug 1, 2002 18:53 UTC (Thu) by scripter (subscriber, #2654) [Link]

Was that a troll? If I use Java, Perl, Ruby, Python or shell script, I don't need Valgrind either. So what?

Valgrind is an outstanding tool, and very worthy of mention since many projects need a good memory debugger.