Re: [Valgrind-users] Helgrind (or Valgrind) based project for undergraduates

[Nicholas N. <nj...@cs...>]

On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Tom Hughes wrote:

>> I have two exceptional undergraduate students who are looking for a
>> one-term final-year project.  Both are primarily interested in systems,
>> so we thought that having them help out with Helgrind would be a good
>> fit.  I mailed the valgrind-dev list to try to make contact with
>> Helgrind's developers, but have heard nothing back; I'd be grateful if
>> someone could let me know (a) whether Helgrind is in fact being revived,
>> (b) if so, whether there's room for talented young hands, or (c) if not,
>> whether there are tasks in Valgrind's development that could be peeled
>> off and given to a pair of students.  We're under a bit of time pressure
>> to get a project nailed down...
>
> There has been some work recently on a new tool called drd which
> might take the place of helgrind? Maybe you should be looking at
> that instead - there has been some discussion on the dev list.

Yes, it could be a very interesting project.  It would also be a very 
challenging one, certainly without any guarantee of a complete final 
outcome, but maybe that isn't a problem.

> Alternatively, there is a list of project ideas on the web site
> somewhere.

There was a recent good project suggestion that hasn't yet made it to the 
page, from Brant Gurganus:

   there are resource allocators at higher levels than malloc/free pairs that
   would be nice to check, preferrably in an easily extensible fashion. I'd
   like to see a way of specifying resource allocators and deallocators that
   are from somebody else's code. For example, I'd like a tool that handles
   finding unmatched malloc/free, fopen/fclose, open/close,
   XOpenDisplay/XCloseDisplay, etc.>

I don't know if this one would be large enough, however.

Nick