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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Pure was an amazing product. For C++ development, we relied on it for my team at SAIC, and when I moved to Angel Studios (we developed games and content for Nintendo, Sega, Disney) I immediately asked the owners to purchase a company license.

I saw Reed Hastings being interviewed on YouTube last night - fascinating how he has so many personal friendships with CEOs of competing companies.

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Purify could find memory errors in just a few minutes that would take engineers days or weeks to track down. The dynamic instrumentation capability on existing binaries was huge. The first time I saw it in use was at Sybase. Running a demo version for an hour found enough problems that we instantly sprang for the license.

I used it at Sybase when I interned there in 2009. I've been fascinated by good developer tools ever since. It was such a joy to run, understand the reports and make fixes, and repeat.

Didn't IBM Rational buy Purify and make it 10x more expensive?

isn't that IBMs MO? Pretty sure rational was a startup at one point, too.

Purify was awesome back then, before Linux and the open source tools.

(I think Purify might've been the first phoning-home tool I saw, finding a way to email Pure if you exceeded your simultaneous licenses, but I might've misunderstood at the time. Around that time, it was normal for big-ticket Unix workstation software to have network license managers, which were tied with stale NFS mounts at our site as the most common cause of a fleet of expensive engineers on expensive workstations with expensive software all suddenly unable to work. :) )

A related awesome C development tool we used for discovering memory errors before then was the Saber-C debugger. https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c/...

It would talk to your local license server, but it was definitely NOT communicating back to corporate.

What timeframe are you talking about?

I could be mistaken, since I no longer have the files from close to 30 years ago.

But I did think I saw a case in which it would try to email corporate about using too many seats.

It was memorable because that's the first time I saw that, and it seemed clever but invasive.

Late 90s/early 2000s. I definitely spent some time with the licensing code and I know it definitely did nothing like that then.

My experience must've been a little before that (I left that job in the mid-90s).

I could be mistaken. Or maybe the licensing code changed (due the Web explosion, or to evolution of a great product, or some other reason).

>Angel Studios

Was this the company that made Midtown Madness 2?

I think so, after I left.

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