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"A wondrous great house Valhalla must be; it must often be exceeding crowded before the doors."

(Gylfaginning, XL)

Valhalla

Valgrind is unintelligible to new C programmers. Here are some reasons why:

  • It contains a lot of extraneous information. New programmers do not need to know anything that starts with 0x, or what the PID is.
  • The words is uses are long and often hard to understand.
  • The stack it shows does not emphasize important information, and it is often not clear which stack is relevant.
  • The insights it gives require interpreting solutions. This relies on a) understanding the output and b) knowing what to do about it

Valhalla is a script that wraps Valgrind to give this information. It focuses on making information clear, and providing actionable errors and insights.

Usage

Valhalla is a wrapper around valgrind, so it is called in the same way. Arguments to valhalla are passed through to valgrind, though the behaviour for those arguments is not defined. Add arguments at your own risk.

# valgrind ./my_program
valhalla ./my_program

Example

Example

Easy Install

Too lazy/busy to install it yourself? Just copy this script!

(mkdir ~/.valhalla && cd ~/.valhalla && git clone https://github.com/tfpk/valhalla.git . && echo "alias valhalla=~/.valhalla/valhalla" >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc); cd -

Tests

To see the program in action:

gcc -g -o demo valhalla_tests/demo.c
./valhalla ./demo

Valhalla will eventually have an automated testing suite. At the moment, all the errors we intend to catch are created by one of the files in valhalla_tests/*.c. They should be compiled with:

gcc -g -o <short_name> <name>.c

Note that the errors they produce may be inconsistent across systems. The canonical system is the UNSW CSE system. To canonicalize the outputs, every file has a matching valhalla_tests/*_report.xml. This is the expected output of valgrind with:

valgrind --leak-check=full --show-leak-kinds=all --xml=yes --xml-file=<short_name>_report.xml --track-origins=yes ./<short_name>

You can use these by running:

valhalla --xml-file <short_name>_report.xml