[geeks] Glowing Review: Rational Purify

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

Nadine Miller wrote:
> On Jun 13, 2008, at 4:10 PM, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 06:55:47PM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>>
>>> Maybe what we need is a feature in all production OS that a valgrind
>>> or a Purify could hook into to help make the analysis part of the code
>>> portable.
>>
>> That may be what we need, but as long as Windows is a production OS, we
>> are screwed.
>>
>> Does DTrace do any of this sort of task?  I'm still rather hazy on
>> DTrace.  On the upside, it is available for 3 OSs already.  If someone
>> ported it to Linux, it would probably really dominate whatever it is
>> that it really does.
> 

Googling for "dtrace memory usage" and "dtrace memory pointer" it seems 
that DTrace can walk memory etc.

see for example
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/DTrace_Topics_Intro#Printing_Stacks

(section 20.2 on this page)

I don't get the feeling that DTrace could quite do what Purify could, 
though it might let you look at an already-running program and figure 
out some of the same things, but it wouldn't be as automatic.

--Patrick