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heinrich5991
Kind of offtopic, but the background really distracts me, I think it has too much detail.
dima55
Yeah, that is offtopic. Why did you bring it up?
gjulianm
I just discovered a few days ago that gdb + valgrind integration. It's awesome for debugging and finding weird memory errors. A neat thing that isn't explained in the article is that valgrind automatically sends SIGTRAP to gdb whenever there are invalid write/reads (even when those wouldn't cause a segfault), so the program stops and you can inspect the state (get backtrace, jump to different frames with "frame #" and inspect variable values) to detect quickly what's causing the error.

By the way, if you're really interested in learning all things gdb, the GNU GDB Manual [1] is really great and detailed, including a PDF version.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/documentation/

rramsden
Wanted to look more into valgrind but their website is down :(
jmspring
Great article. I've recently had to walk some more junior engineers through these tools. I would through in Electric Fence as one to consider.
padenot
I thought I'd mention ASAN [1] for this. It's built in in the most recent version of gcc and clang (just pass -fsanitize=address), and enjoy the nice reporting when you do something silly with a buffer.

We use this extensively at Mozilla when working on Firefox, and I know Google folks use it a lot on Chromium as well.

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/address-sanitizer/