[Valgrind-users] detect writing to TOC(?)

[Paul A. C. <pa...@us...>]

First, Valgrind is a very impressive tool.  I've found it exceedingly
helpful, and am quite impressed with it's performance, given what it
does.  So, sincere kudos to the team!

I think this is a feature request rather than a bug report, but I'm not
knowledgable enough in this area.

I was porting some code to Linux, and in a fit of "get this thing linked
so I can run it", I just created stubs for all unresolved symbols, which
indeed allowed me to run.  Mostly.

I later ran into a situation where the program would crash, and gdb
showed me the line:  a simple assignment to a global variable.  (Perhaps
you've put two and two together already.)  I spent hours on this one. 
gdb even let me set the value to what the program was trying to do. 
Valgrind didn't report any errors.  Nothing obvious, but the program
crashed reliably at that statement every time.

The net is that I had stubbed a global *variable* symbol with a
*function*.  Thus, the assignment to that variable was actually trying
to write into the TOC (is that the correct term?).

Could Valgrind be enhanced to detect this error?

Regards,
Paul Clarke

P.S. What is the preferred pronunciation for "Valgrind"?  is it a long
or short "i"?