Subject: Test with Bounded Pointers for GCC
From: Michael D. Crawford (crawford@goingware.com)
Date: Tue Sep 05 2000 - 02:58:56 CDT
To help you folks get your product to market, I'd like to suggest that
you test with Bounded Pointers for GCC.
This will work with Unix platforms at least; I don't know if it will
work on Windows with the Cygwin GCC or not.
I can't seem to load the web page now but a link for it is given here:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/projects.html
It is still in an early phase but it does work. When I was able to view
the web page before it said that he had successfully boundschecked GCC
itself and a number of other programs with it.
What may be needed before you can successfully use it is the ability to
have boundschecking turned on and off within each compilation unit. I
know that is planned but I'm not sure if it's actually working. The
reason it would be important is that you'd likely find bugs in libraries
like the X library or some other library that you don't really have
under your control.
I own Spotlight for the Macintosh which does pointer bounds checking,
memory leak detection and system call parameter validation. I wouldn't
dream of shipping a product now unless it passed an extensive spotlight
test completely cleanly. On the other hand, it's pretty impressive to
see how many pointer bugs and leaks you can find when you test a mature,
full-featured program with spotlight for the first time.
Spotlight is at http://www.onyx-tech.com - they have a time-limited free
demo.
I'll probably get a chance to start testing AbiWord on the Mac under
Spotlight around the end of the month.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
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