After having serious reliability concerns with ruby-gtk2 on Windows,
I’m wondering if anyone has ever used Rational Purify on Ruby or its
libraries?
For those who are unfamiliar with Purify, it’s much more than just
a memory checker. It rewrites the machine code for each module such
that every memory reference goes through a validity check, so it can
catch reads on uninitialised data, use of pointers to freed memory,
and hundreds more errors that would otherwise be impossible to catch.
A truly wonderful tool, probably the greatest software quality
breakthrough of the 90’s.
If Ruby hasn’t been Purified, does anyone want to join in a project
to do it? I’d like to find someone with access to Purify on Unix, as
I no longer do (I have it for Windows though).
Clifford Heath.
Check out valgrind: http://valgrind.kde.org/overview.html
···
On Thu, 18 Mar 2004 09:37:06 +1100, Clifford Heath wrote:
For those who are unfamiliar with Purify, it’s much more than just a
memory checker. It rewrites the machine code for each module such that
every memory reference goes through a validity check, so it can catch
reads on uninitialised data, use of pointers to freed memory, and hundreds
more errors that would otherwise be impossible to catch. A truly wonderful
tool, probably the greatest software quality breakthrough of the 90’s.
Clifford Heath cjh-nospam@nospaManagesoft.com writes:
If Ruby hasn’t been Purified, does anyone want to join in a project
to do it? I’d like to find someone with access to Purify on Unix, as
I no longer do (I have it for Windows though).
Might want to try valgrind as well. (http://valgrind.kde.org/)
···
–
Josh Huber
Wrote Clifford Heath cjh-nospam@nospaManagesoft.com, on Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 07:36:00AM +0900:
If Ruby hasn’t been Purified, does anyone want to join in a project
to do it? I’d like to find someone with access to Purify on Unix, as
I no longer do (I have it for Windows though).
We have purify on solaris/sparc and insure on linux/x86.
I don’t have much time to spend on this at work, and I don’t know
anything about how purify and insure need to be set up, but if somebody
gave me instructions, and said “do this with this source”, I’d be able
to run the tools, and maybe even do some debugging (it’s a virtual
surety that bugs will be found if the tools haven’t been run before).
Cheers,
Sam
p.s. I’ve only ever used valgrind once, it failed immediately with a
message saying something to the effect of “this is an internal error,
you should never see this message”. Dissapointing, it looked useful, I
can only run Insure and Purify on our servers, I could’ve run valgrind
on my box. Btw, these tools all catch slightly different sets of errors,
Its worth running them all.
···
–
Sam Roberts sroberts@certicom.com
Tim Hunter wrote:
Check out valgrind: http://valgrind.kde.org/overview.html
Indeed, valgrind looks good (much bigger slowdown than Purify,
not that that’s important), but the problems I’ve seen are on
Windoze - and besides, the question was “has it been done, or
does anyone want to?” :-).
Sam Roberts sroberts@certicom.com writes:
p.s. I’ve only ever used valgrind once, it failed immediately with a
message saying something to the effect of “this is an internal
error, you should never see this message”. Dissapointing, it looked
useful, I can only run Insure and Purify on our servers, I could’ve
run valgrind on my box. Btw, these tools all catch slightly
different sets of errors, Its worth running them all.
I’m not sure when you tried, but it’s come a long way. I’ve run
pretty complex software through valgrind, and it’s been invaluable
for tracking down some hard-to-find bugs.
···
–
Josh Huber