Fwd: Helping with KDE4 (valgrind)

[Hamish Rodda]

> ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
>
> Subject: Helping with KDE4
> Date: Sunday 07 May 2006 14:59
> From: Julian Seward <julian at valgrind.org>
> To: faure at kde.org
>
> Hi David
>
> I've been looking at
> http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde-4.0-todo-list.html
> and also thinking about our upcoming 3.2.0 release of Valgrind.
>
> I wanted to communicate the following to the KDE4 core developers.
>
> -------
>
> I'm hoping that KDE4 will be the stablest and fastest KDE yet,
> so I want to help ensure that KDE developers can make effective
> use of Valgrind's debugging and profiling facilities.
>
> Let me know if there is anything we can do from the Valgrind end to
> help with KDE4 development.  That could be fixing problems in V,
> guiding KDE developers in how to use it effectively, or whatever.
> No promises - our development resources are limited - but if there
> are small ways we can help make V more effective for you, I'd be
> interested to hear.

Hi Julian, thanks for your offer.

I've got two issues I'd like to raise:

1) I'm interested to hear if you have any plans to provide a bidirectional 
machine interface for valgrind.  Currently, in order to make Valgrind work 
well with tools such as kdevelop, the xml output is preferred as it is the 
only output that provides the full path for source files, plus it is easier 
and more reliably parsed.

However this doesn't allow attaching debugger sessions as there is no way for 
valgrind to receive input (a documented limitation).  GDB solves this with an 
interactive command line approach and their machine interface syntax.  Could 
valgrind be made to provide such a command line interface, preferably with a 
machine interface syntax as well (perhaps even using gdb's syntax, or an xml 
syntax)?

This might also open up the possibility of querying a paused valgrind for 
information about valid value and valid address of certain memory addresses, 
and backtraces for its allocation/freeing/etc, which could be integrated into 
the debugger support (eg. alongside a variable viewer widget we could display 
which variables are not initialised/allocated).

2) Is the Omega tool (http://www.brainmurders.eclipse.co.uk/omega.html for 
those who haven't come across it) going to be added to Valgrind svn? It looks 
like a promising tool, although I'm having problems with false positives in 
QMap at the moment.

Thanks,
Hamish.
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