I've mentioned this in the past, but due to utter chaos in the life of this consultant I haven't been able to contribute much. I own a license to the Spotlight memory debugger for PowerPC macintosh. It patches the binary of a Mac executable file then runs it under a debugger in such a way that all memory references are validated before they are performed. It will catch a bogus - READ - that is so much as one byte outside its allocated heap block. Also pretty pertinent to getting the XP stuff working properly on the Mac OS, Spotlight does "trap discipline", that is, it verifies that the parameters passed into system calls are within the documented allowable ranges, and it will also do a debugger break if a system call returns an error. And finally, it does memory leak detection. More than watching for a general trend towards growth in your heap, it will record each allocation with a stack crawl when it is made, and erase that record when it is deallocated. When you quit your app, it will tell you what didn't get deallocated. As a longtime user of it, I wouldn't dream of shipping an application unless it were absolutely clean under spotlight. So anyway, I've been dusting off my Mac 8500, and installing some updated development tools on it and stuff in preparation for some consulting work. Once that winds down a bit I should find some time to debug AbiWord with Spotlight. This should happen in about two weeks. If I get steady Mac consulting work for a while (which is a good possibility, but not completely certain), I'm going to get a dual G4 and have a triple-boot system into OS 9.1, Mac OS X and Linux PPC. What I will need is AbiWord for Mac able to build reasonably cleanly and run as far as crashing. What crashing bugs there are should hopefully come from errors that I can find for you rather than stuff just being unimplemented. Linux fans who want to do this kind of stuff can use Bounded Pointers for GCC, although I'm not sure it's mature enough yet: http://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/projects/bp/main.html Also see my MacsBug tips and tricks page at: http://www.goingware.com/tips/macsbug.html Mike Michael D. Crawford GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting http://www.goingware.com/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.
