Hi Monks,

I just had to share this with you. I use Komodo as my main development and debugging tool. It does some things really nicely, but some other things it doesn't do so well: such as crash handling.

Although I have liberal sprinklings of defensive programming, and of course use strict and use warn everywhere, sometimes I still get segmentation faults with no error messages and nothing to indicate even the line of code. I was generally beginning to doubt both my capacity as a programmer and the stability of the tools I was running.

Then I found valgrind.

Valgrind is my new love. If I type valgrind perl ./thingy.pl at the command line, although it runs painfully slowly, when I get a crash, I get a delightfully summarised stack-dump giving me chapter and verse on my crash.

I now sleep peacefully at night, my wife and children have found a new, charming and relaxed husband/dad and everything is peaceful in the household.

If you haven't tried it and code stability is a problem, have a go.

If there is something better, then I'd love to hear about it.

Peace and Love.

Steve