Memory Validator, GlowCode and Boundschecker
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I am evaulating these three products. Mem. Validator is good and has many features, however it did not catch all my leaks and does not attach itself to services very easily. Mem validator is a bit hard to use at first. GlowCode is really simple to use and has less features. It attaches to NT services no problem, however it is less compatible with my programs, and crashes some of them. Boundschecker is what I am trying out today. It has a problem of reporting TOO much, but has a nice feature which allows you to easily supress warinings. It also integrates nicely with my source code and dev studio debugger. Testing continues... If anyone has anything to add or could recommend me with good tools for mainly detecting memory leaks, just let me know. Jeremy. Jeremy Pullicino Professional C++ Developer Done any hacking lately?
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I am evaulating these three products. Mem. Validator is good and has many features, however it did not catch all my leaks and does not attach itself to services very easily. Mem validator is a bit hard to use at first. GlowCode is really simple to use and has less features. It attaches to NT services no problem, however it is less compatible with my programs, and crashes some of them. Boundschecker is what I am trying out today. It has a problem of reporting TOO much, but has a nice feature which allows you to easily supress warinings. It also integrates nicely with my source code and dev studio debugger. Testing continues... If anyone has anything to add or could recommend me with good tools for mainly detecting memory leaks, just let me know. Jeremy. Jeremy Pullicino Professional C++ Developer Done any hacking lately?
I also went through this procedure about 2 years ago when I used to work for Siemens. In addition to the products you mentioned I also looked at Rational Purify (now called PurifyPlus[^]) and Insure++[^]. I found the following:- - Purify integrated best with VC++ and caught 80% of the bugs - Insure++ didn't catch any of the bugs in my test code. When I discussed this with their technical support department they said that it wasn't designed to catch 'obvious' or 'premeditated' errors :confused: - Boundschecker caught about 90% of the bugs and integrated reasonably well with VC++. Anyway, my recommendation was boundschecker but in the end we didn't buy any. Cheers James
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I also went through this procedure about 2 years ago when I used to work for Siemens. In addition to the products you mentioned I also looked at Rational Purify (now called PurifyPlus[^]) and Insure++[^]. I found the following:- - Purify integrated best with VC++ and caught 80% of the bugs - Insure++ didn't catch any of the bugs in my test code. When I discussed this with their technical support department they said that it wasn't designed to catch 'obvious' or 'premeditated' errors :confused: - Boundschecker caught about 90% of the bugs and integrated reasonably well with VC++. Anyway, my recommendation was boundschecker but in the end we didn't buy any. Cheers James
James Spibey wrote: When I discussed this with their technical support department they said that it wasn't designed to catch 'obvious' or 'premeditated' errors Wow, what a great cop-out! "No, it will never find intentional errors in test code, because you already know they are there." Must make doing a review sorta hard though... :laugh:
[Shog9]
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I am evaulating these three products. Mem. Validator is good and has many features, however it did not catch all my leaks and does not attach itself to services very easily. Mem validator is a bit hard to use at first. GlowCode is really simple to use and has less features. It attaches to NT services no problem, however it is less compatible with my programs, and crashes some of them. Boundschecker is what I am trying out today. It has a problem of reporting TOO much, but has a nice feature which allows you to easily supress warinings. It also integrates nicely with my source code and dev studio debugger. Testing continues... If anyone has anything to add or could recommend me with good tools for mainly detecting memory leaks, just let me know. Jeremy. Jeremy Pullicino Professional C++ Developer Done any hacking lately?
The first time I bought Boundschecker was in the early 90s after a week of chasing an extremely elusive memory bug (sorry, that's a little redundant, isn't it?). Boundschecker caught it on the first run, dropped me off at the offending line of code and in my opinion paid for itself in less than 5 minutes. Can't speak to their latest release, but at the time I was convinced that the Programming Gods had finally taken human form... Chistopher Duncan Author - The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World (Apress)
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I am evaulating these three products. Mem. Validator is good and has many features, however it did not catch all my leaks and does not attach itself to services very easily. Mem validator is a bit hard to use at first. GlowCode is really simple to use and has less features. It attaches to NT services no problem, however it is less compatible with my programs, and crashes some of them. Boundschecker is what I am trying out today. It has a problem of reporting TOO much, but has a nice feature which allows you to easily supress warinings. It also integrates nicely with my source code and dev studio debugger. Testing continues... If anyone has anything to add or could recommend me with good tools for mainly detecting memory leaks, just let me know. Jeremy. Jeremy Pullicino Professional C++ Developer Done any hacking lately?
Have you checked out the Memory Validator overview (and more importantly, are such overviews valuable?) cheers, Chris Maunder
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I am evaulating these three products. Mem. Validator is good and has many features, however it did not catch all my leaks and does not attach itself to services very easily. Mem validator is a bit hard to use at first. GlowCode is really simple to use and has less features. It attaches to NT services no problem, however it is less compatible with my programs, and crashes some of them. Boundschecker is what I am trying out today. It has a problem of reporting TOO much, but has a nice feature which allows you to easily supress warinings. It also integrates nicely with my source code and dev studio debugger. Testing continues... If anyone has anything to add or could recommend me with good tools for mainly detecting memory leaks, just let me know. Jeremy. Jeremy Pullicino Professional C++ Developer Done any hacking lately?
I work for GlowCode and am interested in the discussions about our memory leak detection and profiling. We're a programmer-run company, and take pride in our responsiveness to the developer community. If you're using GlowCode and you have any questions or suggestions for enhancements, please write to me at barbara.shafer@glowcode.com. If you'd like to try GlowCode, feel free to download and request an evaluation license from http://www.glowcode.com/eval.htm. I look forward to hearing from you. Barbara Shafer VP, Product Management Electric Software, Inc. ~ developer of GlowCode barbara.shafer@glowcode.com www.glowcode.com
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Have you checked out the Memory Validator overview (and more importantly, are such overviews valuable?) cheers, Chris Maunder
Hi Chris, Yes, I did check the overview - in fact, thanks for putting it in the showcase because that is where I heard about mem. validator from. The product does live up to most of what it promises - I really like the way you could learn how to use the program in beginner, intermediate and advanced mode. It was up, running and debugging within minuites and had little impact on my applications. However, I did click on a feature (some memory view .. I forgot), and i got a crash screen (detected by mem validator). There was a button whcih would enable me to copy the error report, however, the dialog was crashed also. The head of the testing labs liked the product very much, but thinks it might be too complicated for the testers since we are only interested in them detecting that a leak exists, nothing more. Testing goes on... Jeremy Pullicino Professional C++ Developer Done any hacking lately?
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I work for GlowCode and am interested in the discussions about our memory leak detection and profiling. We're a programmer-run company, and take pride in our responsiveness to the developer community. If you're using GlowCode and you have any questions or suggestions for enhancements, please write to me at barbara.shafer@glowcode.com. If you'd like to try GlowCode, feel free to download and request an evaluation license from http://www.glowcode.com/eval.htm. I look forward to hearing from you. Barbara Shafer VP, Product Management Electric Software, Inc. ~ developer of GlowCode barbara.shafer@glowcode.com www.glowcode.com
I am currently evaulating different products for different capabilities and I find glowcode very easy to install and use. I especially like its capability to attach to W2K services. It is also a very good tool for our testing labs since without much training, they could check our code for memory leaks and give us very good logs for debugging (imagine giving boundschecker to your testers!). I sent glowcode for evaulation to the testing labs and got reports on some of our modules crashing when used with glowcode - I did not collect any logs from those crashes, and I must say that our testers do a very good job of making things crash. Tomorrow I will ask my testers to give me a copy of the crash logs that glowcode generated and send them over to you. I thank you for such a response, I am glad that someone from glowcode is reading these posts! Jeremy Pullicino Professional C++ Developer Done any hacking lately?
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Hi Chris, Yes, I did check the overview - in fact, thanks for putting it in the showcase because that is where I heard about mem. validator from. The product does live up to most of what it promises - I really like the way you could learn how to use the program in beginner, intermediate and advanced mode. It was up, running and debugging within minuites and had little impact on my applications. However, I did click on a feature (some memory view .. I forgot), and i got a crash screen (detected by mem validator). There was a button whcih would enable me to copy the error report, however, the dialog was crashed also. The head of the testing labs liked the product very much, but thinks it might be too complicated for the testers since we are only interested in them detecting that a leak exists, nothing more. Testing goes on... Jeremy Pullicino Professional C++ Developer Done any hacking lately?
Jeremy Pullicino wrote: The product does live up to most of what it promises - I really like the way you could learn how to use the program in beginner, intermediate and advanced mode. Thank you. We added this in response to user requests. It was up, running and debugging within minuites and had little impact on my applications. Thank you. However, I did click on a feature (some memory view .. I forgot), and i got a crash screen (detected by mem validator). We've recently fixed a variety of bugs, and implemented new features for a customer. I notice that you have not contacted us describing the bug. If you had, we probably could have got you a bug fix within a day or so (our fastest bug turnaround is 4 hours, slowest is 1.5 weeks). There was a button whcih would enable me to copy the error report, however, the dialog was crashed also. Thats just bad luck, when an app is crashed you've no idea whats been messed with, and the button uses the clipboard functions and getting the dialog up uses the C++ heap, so there is plenty of scope for it to go wrong at this point. The head of the testing labs liked the product very much, but thinks it might be too complicated for the testers since we are only interested in them detecting that a leak exists, nothing more. I'm confused, as this is trivial to with Memory Validator. Just start your app, run it until completion. Memory Validator shows you leaked memory in the leaked colour (default is yellow). What could be easier?
You can also run it from the command line, so you can embed the entire process in a script so your testers don't even need to point and click on anything in Memory Validator.
Please contact me at support@softwareverify.com, I'll be happy to write new tutorials covering any topics your testers require. Stephen Kellett -- Memory Validator. Faster Leak Detection, Better Analysis. http://www.softwareverify.com http://www.objmedia.demon.co.uk/rsi.html
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I am evaulating these three products. Mem. Validator is good and has many features, however it did not catch all my leaks and does not attach itself to services very easily. Mem validator is a bit hard to use at first. GlowCode is really simple to use and has less features. It attaches to NT services no problem, however it is less compatible with my programs, and crashes some of them. Boundschecker is what I am trying out today. It has a problem of reporting TOO much, but has a nice feature which allows you to easily supress warinings. It also integrates nicely with my source code and dev studio debugger. Testing continues... If anyone has anything to add or could recommend me with good tools for mainly detecting memory leaks, just let me know. Jeremy. Jeremy Pullicino Professional C++ Developer Done any hacking lately?
_Mem. Validator is good and has many features, however it did not catch all my leaks and does not attach itself to services very easily. Mem validator is a bit hard to use at first. _If Memory Validator is not catching all your leaks, please contact us, as I know that it attaches to your program earlier than GlowCode can attach, and thus sees all your program's allocations. If you have found a bug in allocation detection then we will fix it for you.
I have yet to see a situation where we are not detecting leaks correctly. Usually it is a data collection/data display configuration setting that is not enabled.
It is very frustrating that you are having problems with Memory Validator, and have not contacted us to test our customer support. Please contact us and we can help you. Stephen Kellett -- Memory Validator. Faster Leak Detection, Better Analysis. http://www.softwareverify.com http://www.objmedia.demon.co.uk/rsi.html__