Twenty Years of Valgrind

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

Our great sponsors
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
  • sanitizers

    AddressSanitizer, ThreadSanitizer, MemorySanitizer

  • Seconding `rr` as suggested by @tux3, it's great for debugging.

    Also, the sanitizers for GCC and Clang (https://github.com/google/sanitizers), and the Clang static analyzer (and tidy too) through CodeChecker (https://codechecker.readthedocs.io/).

    For the Clang static analyzer, make sure your LLVM toolchain has the Z3 support enabled (OK in Debian stable for example), and enable cross translation units (CTU) analysis too for better results.

  • leakdice

    Monte Carlo leak diagnostic for Linux binaries

  • In my obviously biased opinion, very specialised, but sometimes exactly what you needed (I have used this in anger maybe 2-3 times in my career since then, which is why I wrote the C version):

    https://github.com/tialaramex/leakdice (or https://github.com/tialaramex/leakdice-rust)

    Leakdice implements some of Raymond Chen's "The poor man’s way of identifying memory leaks" for you. On Linux at least.

    https://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20050815_224...

    All leakdice does is: You pick a running process which you own, leakdice picks a random heap page belonging to that process and shows you that page as hex + ASCII.

    The Raymond Chen article explains why you might ever want to do this.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

    InfluxDB logo
  • leakdice-rust

    Rust re-implementation of leakdice

  • In my obviously biased opinion, very specialised, but sometimes exactly what you needed (I have used this in anger maybe 2-3 times in my career since then, which is why I wrote the C version):

    https://github.com/tialaramex/leakdice (or https://github.com/tialaramex/leakdice-rust)

    Leakdice implements some of Raymond Chen's "The poor man’s way of identifying memory leaks" for you. On Linux at least.

    https://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20050815_224...

    All leakdice does is: You pick a running process which you own, leakdice picks a random heap page belonging to that process and shows you that page as hex + ASCII.

    The Raymond Chen article explains why you might ever want to do this.

  • codechecker

    CodeChecker is an analyzer tooling, defect database and viewer extension for the Clang Static Analyzer and Clang Tidy

  • Seconding `rr` as suggested by @tux3, it's great for debugging.

    Also, the sanitizers for GCC and Clang (https://github.com/google/sanitizers), and the Clang static analyzer (and tidy too) through CodeChecker (https://codechecker.readthedocs.io/).

    For the Clang static analyzer, make sure your LLVM toolchain has the Z3 support enabled (OK in Debian stable for example), and enable cross translation units (CTU) analysis too for better results.

  • hotspot

    The Linux perf GUI for performance analysis.

  • Ignore the command, it's just a placeholder to get meaningful values. The -d flag adds basic cache events, by adding another -d you also get load and load miss events for the dTLB, iTLB and L1i cache.

    But as mentioned, you can instrument any event supported by your system. Including very obscure events such as uops_executed.cycles_ge_2_uops_exec (Cycles where at least 2 uops were executed per-thread) or frontend_retired.latency_ge_2_bubbles_ge_2 (Retired instructions that are fetched after an interval where the front-end had at least 2 bubble-slots for a period of 2 cycles which was not interrupted by a back-end stall).

    You can also record data using perf-record(1) and inspect them using perf-report(1) or - my personal favorite - the Hotspot tool (https://github.com/KDAB/hotspot).

    Sorry for hijacking the discussion a little, but I think perf is an awesome little tool and not as widely known as it should be. IMO, when using it as a profiler (perf-record), it is vastly superior to any language-specific built-in profiler. Unfortunately some languages (such as Python or Haskell) are not a good fit for profiling using perf instrumentation as their stack frame model does not quite map to the C model.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

    WorkOS logo
NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

Suggest a related project

Related posts