Twenty years of Valgrind

Hah, I teach my students to use Valgrind, and I’ve been pronouncing it wrong this whole time. Guess I’ll have to make sure to get that right next semester :)

The magic of Valgrind really lies in its ability to detect errors without recompiling the code. Sure, there’s a performance hit, but sometimes all you have is a binary. It’s damn solid on Linux, and works even with the custom threading library we use for the course; shame the macOS port is barely maintained (last I checked, it only worked on OSes from a few years back - anything more recent will execute syscalls during process startup that Valgrind doesn’t handle).

I was introduced to valgrind by Andrew Tridgell during the main content of a vaguely famous lecture he gave that finished with the audience collectively writing a shellscript bitkeeper client [1] demonstrating beyond doubt that Tridge had not in any way acted like a "git" when bitkeeper's licenseholder pulled the license for the linux kernel community.

Tridge said words to the effect "if you program in C and you don't aren't using valgrind you flipping should be!" And went on to talk about how some projects like to have a "valgrind clean" build the same way they compile without warnings and that it's a really useful thing. As ever well expressed with examples from samba development.

He was obviously right and I started using valgrind right there in the lecture theatre. apt-get install is a beautiful thing.

He pronounced it val grind like the first part of "value" and "grind" as in grinding coffee beans. I haven't been able to change my pronunciation since then regardless of it being "wrong".

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/132938/

Corbett's account of this is actually wrong in the lwn link above. Noted by akumria in the comments below it. Every single command and suggestion came from the audience, starting with telnetting to Ted Tso's bitkeeper ip & port that he made available for the demo. Typing help came from the audience as did using netcat and the entire nc command. The audience wrote the bitkeeper client in 2 minutes with tridge doing no more than encouraging, typing and pointing out the "tridge is a wizard reverse engineer who has used his powers for evil" Was clearly just some "wrong thinking." Linus claimed thereafter that Git was named after himself and not Tridge.

I used Purify 8 years ago. On Windows. I don't remember the specifics but the company kept a few XP machines around just so they could continue using Purify.

I’m surprised to see the attribution to the tools and not your proposed fixes. Sure the discovery was the first step in the order of operations, but can you elaborate on what enabled you to understand the problem statement and subsequent resolution?

There has to be a deeper understanding I think

It's giving me flashbacks to the hard G vs soft G in gif image format.