macOS Valgrind mac support now on trunk!

[DanKegel]

http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2009/05/28/mac-os-x-now-supported-on-the-valgrind-trunk/

Looks like Valgrind 3.5.0 will support the Mac!

You can use it already by checking it out from the svn trunk and
building it yourself. We use it in the Chromium continuous build and test
system, and it has caught quite a few issues (some in Mac OS X itself,
including a rather heinous ATI driver problem that crashes Display Manager).

http://groups.google.com/group/vim_mac/msg/2bfd871b82c9b3b1
is an example of someone using it to find a bug in Mac Vim.
(Though that was written before the merge to trunk, so it still
refers to the old DARWIN branch.)

Also note: if you want line numbers, you need to generate a dSYM file, which can be slow.

 

[kpua]

This is very big news. I've been waiting for this for probably 4 years or more now, and I'm sure others have been waiting even longer. Thanks for passing along the great news!

 

[Cromulent]

I know this is an old thread but I just checked out the Valgrind SVN release and it seems to work well although I am still a little confused as to why Valgrind is better than using Instruments and Shark though?

Can anyone shed some light on that for me?

 

[Catfish_Man]

Shark is almost exclusively a performance tool. Instruments is a sort of performance/behavioral insight hybrid tool. Valgrind is very much a correctness tool, although a few performance tools (Cachegrind, etc...) run on its foundation.

 

[Thomas Harte]

So, the set of tools that an Objective-C programmer would be well advised to include in their arsenal for debugging and checking correctness is at least:

• Instruments
• Guard Malloc
• Valgrind
• Clang (eg, through AnalysisTool)

Any other useful tips?

 

[Cromulent]

Wow, I didn't know about Analysis Tool. It looks pretty useful. Thanks for the link.

 

[kainjow]

Wow, I didn't know about Analysis Tool. It looks pretty useful. Thanks for the link.

You'll be in for a nice surprise then with Xcode 3.2

 

[Cromulent]

You'll be in for a nice surprise then with Xcode 3.2

Oddly enough I am an ADC Select member, I just haven't had the time to check out Xcode on Snow Leopard yet. Maybe I'll need to now.