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Date:      Wed, 14 Jan 1998 09:54:55 -0600
From:      Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org>
Subject:   Re: Purify/Insure++
Message-ID:  <19980114095455.17333@emsphone.com>
In-Reply-To: <1818.884759528@time.cdrom.com>; from "Jordan K. Hubbard" on Tue Jan 13 22:32:08 GMT 1998
References:  <1818.884759528@time.cdrom.com>

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In the last episode (Jan 13), Jordan K. Hubbard said:
> > 	I guess this begs the question as to what they would consider a
> > large enough market in order to do the port?  Same for pretty much
> > any commercial port, how many ppl would have to commit to
> > purchasing a copy to make it viable for them?
> 
> In other words, "Forget it."  If we want Insure or Purify in the free
> software world, we're going to have to do our own versions and hope
> that there aren't too many software patents on the process.

Not sure if this is in the same area of "debugging" tools or in a
different niche, but I've had good results with the bounds-checking gcc
patch to 2.7.2.  It slows down your program quite a bit when enabled,
but does range and type checking on every variable, pointer, and array
in your code.   Makes finding buffer-overflow bugs a no-brainer.

The code is for 2.7.2, but should build on 2.7.2.1 with minimal
patching.  Wonder if the egcc people are thinking about a
bounds-checking patch; would be a nice addition.

	-Dan Nelson
	dnelson@emsphone.com



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