Re: [Valgrind-users] skin idea

[John R. <re...@cs...>]

> You need to come up with a more precise definition of what the error
> case is, and how to distinguish it from correct usage.  If you report
> every instance of overflow or underflow, the tool would be useless for
> all the messages it generates.

Yeah.  My idea here is to use some sort of simple run-time type inference
to find a subset of the program variables to track, and then to use lots
of heuristics to suppress errors for common compiler and programmer
idioms.

The main problem with this idea is that where I really want to apply it is
to embedded systems where people commonly choose smallish datatypes to
save memory and because larger-than-machine-word ints are computationally
expensive.  Overflow probably isn't that big of a problem for desktop
programs these days since most sensible programmers use 32-bit ints pretty
widely and these don't overflow that much.  Oh well...

John