Subject: Mac spotlight demo available
crawford@goingware.com
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 01:49:23 CST
Hi,
Those of you who have PowerPC macintoshes will find downloading the
spotlight demo very worthwhile. It's here:
http://www.onyx-tech.com/demo/sl_demo.html
You need to email them to get the demo serial number.
The real product is $199. I suggest you mortgage your intimate relatives for
the money to purchase - it will be the best money you ever spent on a
programming tool.
Why?
- Spotlight patches the binaries of executable applications to validate every
memory access before it happens. It will even validate memory _reads_ to
make sure memory is in allocated space.
- It will track memory leaks, very effectively too.
I forgot to delete _one_ object in a program I'm working on, and it was the root
of a lot of other stuff such that there were thousands of objects that leaked;
spotlight reported all of them and overflowed the 32k limit of Mac textedit
buffers when displaying me the leak results.
- it validates the parameters to macos system and toolbox calls ("trap
discipline").
On my last mac product, when I was done, it had absolutely _no_ pointer
bugs that I could find in hours of testing, and the only leaks were one-time
objects that were allocated at startup and never released.
On the other hand, I tested release 2.6 of a major commercial product for the
first time under spotlight, and the publishers thought it was a high-quality
program. But spotlight found so many thousands of errors that after several
weeks of taking out pointer bugs I had to give up.
I expect I'll be able to start spending some time running AbiWord through
spotlight in the next few days. Most of the bugs I find will likely be on other
platforms as well, so we'll all benefit.
There are similar tools on other platforms.
Mike
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com
Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow
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