Valgrind works with --pdump

I recently saw an announcement for yet another memory leak finding tool, valgrind (<URL:http://developer.kde.org/~sewardj/>). It only works on the x86 platform. It requires no source modifications, so I thought I would try it out on XEmacs. After exchanging several bug reports, clarifications, etc. with the author, Julian Seward, he managed to track down and fix a couple of bugs in valgrind that prevented it from working with a --pdumped XEmacs. (It does not work yet with an XEmacs dumped the old way, although apparently it does work with Emacs 21.2.) The April 27 snapshot works. I have mostly found library bugs so far (namely, glibc, xpm, and X11). However, it does claim that XEmacs 21.5, latest CVS, leaked a miniscule amount of memory (i.e., at exit, there were no pointers to previously malloced blocks). That was 26 bytes in 128 blocks that were xmalloc()ed from within Fmake_byte_code. This does not seem like a terribly worrisome memory leak. :-) Warning: it's dog slow. For those who don't have access to Purify, this is at least a free option. -- Jerry James