Why I think it's worth fixing Valgrind warnings

[Rob Shearman]

2008/5/27 Steven Edwards <winehacker at gmail.com>:
> On Tue, May 27, 2008 at 5:29 AM, Steven Edwards <winehacker at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hmm actually I thought prefast had a way to profile running code
>> rather than just static analysis but I guess not. I must have been
>> thinking of the Driver Verifier. I think valgrind might actually be
>> useful then as I don't know of a free profiler for userland code on
>> windows.
>
> OK no more 5AM spam after this, I promise. This is what I was thinking of
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bd02c19c-1250-433c-8c1b-2619bd93b3a2&DisplayLang=en
>
> The Application Verifier. If we want to help windows developers move
> over, we should try to get this working.

While Win32 application developer may use MS's Application Verifier to
debug heap overruns (using the Page Heap feature), I believe Valgrind
is much superior in doing this and Valgrind logs errors about heap
under-runs and accessing invalid memory on the stack.

There are other features available in the Application Verifier
(information on MSDN is 404 so this is from memory) like randomly
returning NULL from HeapAlloc/HeapReAlloc to ensure that the program
doesn't crash in OOM situations, but I believe this is provided by
turning on options in the Heap implementation rather than any magic in
the Application Verifier itself.

-- 
Rob Shearman