Are people using Valgrind on Python packages?
It seems some packages (even basic ones) are not compatible with Valgrind, thereby spoiling the entire debugging experience.
Twenty years of Valgrind
101–110 of 118 posts
Re: Twenty years of Valgrind
#102It's unfortunate that so many of these great tools (like `perf` and I believe `valgrind`) are basically not available locally on the Mac. And running in a container is not really a solution for most of these.
valgrind is available on mac. From the homepage: "It runs on the following platforms: (...) X86/Darwin and AMD64/Darwin (Mac OS X 10.12).". There's a notable omission of ARM64/Darwin in there, and I don't think it's an oversight. What Mac is definitely lacking, though, is reverse debugging. Linux has rr, Windows has Time Travel Debugging. macOS still doesn't have an equivalent.
There have been 6 major releases since 10.12 (which was from late 2016). In other words, valgrind has basically stopped supporting macOS.
Re: Twenty years of Valgrind
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
valgrind is available on mac. From the homepage: "It runs on the following platforms: (...) X86/Darwin and AMD64/Darwin (Mac OS X 10.12).". There's a notable omission of ARM64/Darwin in there, and I don't think it's an oversight. What Mac is definitely lacking, though, is reverse debugging. Linux has rr, Windows has Time Travel Debugging. macOS still doesn't have an equivalent.
Valgrind, as I understand it, was essentially maintained by one engineer at Apple who has since left the company, so nobody has really updated it.
That's my understanding too, and I believe you're referring Greg Parker:
Re: Twenty years of Valgrind
#104One problem with Valgrind is that the thing you're debugging should have been tested with Valgrind from the start, otherwise you're just going to be flooded with false triggers.
Now imagine that you're developing a new application and you want to use some library, and it hasn't been tested with valgrind and generates tons of false messages. Should you then use it? Or look for an alternative library?
Re: Twenty years of Valgrind
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds great until you realise in other languages you get that by default without any tooling. And with better guarantees too (C++ static analysers aren’t foolproof). Where C++ tooling really lacks is around library management and build tooling. The problem is less that any of the individual tools don’t work and more that there are many of them and they don’t interoperate nicely.
What language that has anything like cachegrind which is the topic of this thread? Cache misuse is one of the largest causes of bad performance these days, and I can't think of any language that has anything built in for that. Sure other languages have some nice tools to do garbage collection (so does C++, but it is optional, and reference counting does have drawbacks), but there are a lot more to tooling than just g…
> Even rust's memory model has places where it can't do what C++ can. (you can't use atomic to write data from two different threads at the same time)
Perhaps not in safe Rust, but can you provide an example of something Rust can't do that C++ can? It has the same memory model as C++20: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/atomics.html
Re: Twenty years of Valgrind
#106I was working on an application for Symbian mobile phones and I was able to implement large parts of it as a portable library - the bits which compressed results using a dictionary to make them tiny enough to fit into an SMS message or a UDP frame. This was before the days of flat-rate charges for internet access and we were trying to be very economical with data.
I was able to build and debug them on Linux with Valgrind finding many stupid mistakes and the library worked flawlessly on Symbian.
It's just one of the many times that Valgrind has saved my bacon. It's awesome.
Re: Twenty years of Valgrind
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
What language that has anything like cachegrind which is the topic of this thread? Cache misuse is one of the largest causes of bad performance these days, and I can't think of any language that has anything built in for that. Sure other languages have some nice tools to do garbage collection (so does C++, but it is optional, and reference counting does have drawbacks), but there are a lot more to tooling than just g…
> Even rust's memory model has places where it can't do what C++ can. (you can't use atomic to write data from two different threads at the same time) Perhaps not in safe Rust, but can you provide an example of something Rust can't do that C++ can? It has the same memory model as C++20: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/atomics.html
You totally can in safe rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/sync/atomic/struct.AtomicU64.h...
Re: Twenty years of Valgrind
#108First of all congratulations to Valgrind and the team behind it! This is an essential tool that help me personally over the years while developing.
What needs to be done to get Valgrind binaries available for MacOS (M1) ?, from a company perspective we are happy to support this work. If you know who's interest and can accomplish this pls drop me an email to eduardo at calyptia dot com.
Re: Twenty years of Valgrind
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds great until you realise in other languages you get that by default without any tooling. And with better guarantees too (C++ static analysers aren’t foolproof). Where C++ tooling really lacks is around library management and build tooling. The problem is less that any of the individual tools don’t work and more that there are many of them and they don’t interoperate nicely.
What language that has anything like cachegrind which is the topic of this thread? Cache misuse is one of the largest causes of bad performance these days, and I can't think of any language that has anything built in for that. Sure other languages have some nice tools to do garbage collection (so does C++, but it is optional, and reference counting does have drawbacks), but there are a lot more to tooling than just g…
To be fair as an outsider to both Rust and Js they seem to have pretty robust package management between cargo and npm, although npm is kinda cheating as collating scripts isn't quite as complex building binaries whereas PIP's absolutely unberable with all the virtual env stuff.
I've been quite lucky with CMake, after the initial learning period I've found everything "just works" as it is quite well supported by modern libs.
Re: Twenty years of Valgrind
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
valgrind is available on mac. From the homepage: "It runs on the following platforms: (...) X86/Darwin and AMD64/Darwin (Mac OS X 10.12).". There's a notable omission of ARM64/Darwin in there, and I don't think it's an oversight. What Mac is definitely lacking, though, is reverse debugging. Linux has rr, Windows has Time Travel Debugging. macOS still doesn't have an equivalent.
Valgrind, as I understand it, was essentially maintained by one engineer at Apple who has since left the company, so nobody has really updated it.
He's still at Apple, but he works on the Swift runtime these days rather than C/C++ tooling.