Re: mailutils (rf822 parser)

[Richard Dawe]

Hello.

Sam Roberts wrote:
> And I'm not sure how to test it. Will electric fence detect unfreed
> memory on program exit? Any other more portable suggestions? I
> think I can stub malloc by using GNU ld magic, might look into that.

You may want to look at MSS, the Memory Supervision System. This has
wrapper functions for malloc(), etc. and I think it uses macros to invoke
these wrappers. You can make it produce a log file of memory statistics -
where a block was allocated, where a block was freed, how many blocks were
allocated, how many were not freed, etc. It was useful when I was trying
to "balance the books" on memory allocation for one of my projects.

MSS is here:

    http://hem1.passagen.se/blizzar/mss/index.html

> We've purify at work, it might do something useful.

I've used purify a bit at work on Solaris 2.5.1 for runtime bounds
checking, but I don't remember it reporting which blocks were not freed on
exit. Perhaps you need to invoke it with an extra option?

Purify is nice program though - fixed lots of bugs with it. Naturally they
were in other people's code. 8)

Bye, Rich =]

-- 
Richard Dawe <address@hidden> http://www.bigfoot.com/~richdawe/ 

"The soul is the mirror of an indestructible universe."
--- Gottfried W. Leibniz