Re: Joy of this, Joy of that

On 11/27/24 22:06, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Wed, 27 Nov 2024 09:27:35 +0000, Pancho wrote:
 

I remember we ran a tool
called Purify to spot this type of error, amongst other errors.
Presumably that injected additional code to check reliably.

 As I understand it, Valgrind does it on your executable without source
code changes.

Yeah, It was 30 years ago, I think Purify modified binary code, not source code, but I can't really remember. I just remember Purify was brilliant..
The proper term is "instrumentation".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentation_(computer_programming)>
I note Valgrind Memcheck inserts instrumentation too.
Development standards have improved, languages are much better now, but back then we really needed help. Our main problem was memory leaks, we had to regularly restart servers.
We also used similar tools to provide data on program performance, profiling.