Bug 201118

Summary: Welcome mat for purify users
Product: [Developer tools] valgrind Reporter: Dan Kegel <dank>
Component: generalAssignee: Julian Seward <jseward>
Status: RESOLVED NOT A BUG    
Severity: wishlist CC: pjfloyd, tom
Priority: NOR    
Version First Reported In: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: Compiled Sources   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Dan Kegel 2009-07-22 16:59:11 UTC 
Version:            (using Devel)
OS:                Linux
Installed from:    Compiled sources

The Valgrind doc might benefit from a section for people 
used to Purify.

For example:

Projects that use both Purify and Valgrind (say, one on Windows
and one on Mac and Linux) might like to use a uniform set of
names for memory access errors.  It'd be nice if the language
purify and valgrind used to describe their warnings were more
uniform, and in particular, if valgrind could be told to tag
each error using the same TLA as Purify.   A few purify error types are

UMR (Uninitialized memory read)
UMW (Uninitialized memory write)
MLK (Memory leak)
FMR (Free memory read)
FUM (Freeing unallocated memory)
FNH (Freeing non-heap memory)
NPW (Null pointer write)
NPR (Null pointer read)

This is petty because projects in this situation can trivially
write a sed script to do this, and impossible because there isn't
a one-to-one mapping between the errors found by the two products.
But perhaps a best effort script could be given in the documentation.
Comment 1 Tom Hughes 2009-07-22 17:09:12 UTC 
Why pick on purify for this special treatment? What about other free and/or commercial products...

Should we tag each message with codes to match each of them? That might quickly get somewhat out of hand...
Comment 2 Dan Kegel 2009-07-22 17:41:06 UTC 
I'd be happy with a section in the doc for each competing tool,
welcoming its users to valgrind.  Note that my suggested resolution
was a sed script in the documentation, and we could provide
one of those for each competing tool.

I only mention purify because that's the competing tool we
happen to use alongside valgrind.  (We also use Coverity,
but that's not quite a competitor.)
Comment 3 Paul Floyd 2023-01-18 17:18:40 UTC 
I think that this is now obsolete.