Dynamic analysis tools
Although the value of a debugger is hard to dismiss, there are times when one needs a different type of tool to answer questions about things such as memory usage, leaks, and to diagnose or prevent threading issues. This is where tools such as those which are part of the Valgrind suite of dynamic analysis tools can be of great help. As a framework for building dynamic analysis tools, the Valgrind distribution currently contains the following tools which are of interest to us:
- Memcheck
- Helgrind
- DRD
Memcheck is a memory error detector, which allows us to discover memory leaks, illegal reads and writes, as well as allocation, deallocation, and similar memory-related issues.
Helgrind and DRD are both thread error detectors. This basically means that they will attempt to detect any multithreading issues such as data races and incorrect use of mutexes. Where they differ is that Helgrind can detect locking order violations, and DRD supports detached threads, while also using less...
