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pjmlp

> Every beginner tutorial ought to be using sanitizers from page 1 where they teach how to compile a program with gcc.

This right there.

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It’s kind of amazing how many university programs teach C(++) without mentioning this at all.

Yeah, unfortunely quality teaching is seldom widespread in good quantities.

And it's not going to improve with ChatGPT around:

https://substack.com/profile/135747695-nobody-has-time-for-p...

Also the problem goes both way. I often see people trying to learn React with little grasp of JS, or Django like it's a language, and not something based on Python.

This problem of skill shortcuts is not confined to programming.

I work on networking. People always want to learn "packet capture analysis" because Wireshark has a cool name and looks impressive.

imo there is no such skill as packet capture analysis.

Once one learns the OSI model and a bunch of Ethernet and TCP/IP implementation behaviour, then what Wireshark presents becomes obvious and supported by that contextual knowledge.

It's kind of amazing how many university programs teach C(++) just wrong.

Wrong and outdated!

Apparently, in India many schools still didn't update the curriculum and teach Turbo C!

And valgrind!

That means building the code twice. In practice the only thing valgrind does that asan doesn't is checking for non-initialized variables. There's another sanitizer for this called msan.

Unfortunately not all of the sanitizers are working in clang for Apple Silicon machines. For my own CI pipeline I run both Darwin and Linux builds, leaks and valgrind respectively, along with the kitchen sink of compiler sanitizers:

Here’s the GitHub actions for those platforms and a link to the Makefile:

GitHub Action:

https://github.com/williamcotton/express-c/blob/master/.gith...

Makefile:

https://github.com/williamcotton/express-c/blob/f2e1dde2f5a7...

That's an interesting problem. Is this the case for all aarch64 platforms or is this specific to Apple's hardware?

valgrind runs on your unmodified binary, it's asan that needs a separate build.

The build you'd use for development, to run unit tests and validate merge requests, is the as-instrumented-as-possible build.

valgrind is too slow for day-to-day use. I only use it when I have something specific in mind.

I guess would be acceptible in CI pipeline too, but never tried.

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