Re: Purify cleanliness

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Jonathan,

On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Jonathan Bartlett wrote:
> What is "purify cleanliness" on autoconf?

        An excellent question; just adding to the FAQ.

* What is the "purify cleanliness" autoconf option ?

        This (unfinished) option allows the ORB to be configured to
run in a slightly slower, but 'cleaner' mode. Purify is a tool that
performs advanced memory debugging, and it will detect many common
errors. Some of the things ORBit2 can do eg. using uninitialized stack
space as a source of randomness will flag false positives as purify
errors ( an Uninitialized Memory Read or UMR ). Enabling this flag
ensures that all such memory will be blanked first before being read.
This also applies to initializing return values before returning them,
even on exceptions - a case where CORBA specifies an uninitialized
return value.

        The performance impact of having a putify clean ORB is
probably fairly minimal, perhaps ~10% slower max., finger in the air
guestimation.

        HTH,

                Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks@gnu.org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot