Saint's Log

Quick Introduction to Valgrind

For my Computer Aided Geometric Design course, a simple program called CPLOT is used for some of the project work. Its documentation is on the course website. After my initial draft of my project 1 implementation crashed, I was inspired to try out Valgrind on CPLOT (even though I was able to find the bugs using my debugger). All that’s needed to install Valgrind on Ubuntu is sudo apt-get install valgrind. The CPLOT code supplied needed a minor change in order to compile, so I changed

#include <string.h>;

into

#include <string.h>;

and all was well with the world again. The updated CPLOT code is available in my public repo. Line 1 below compiles the code. The Valgrind Quick Start Guide recommends using the -g flag to produce debugging information so that Memcheck’s error messages include exact line numbers.

g++ -g -o cplot.out cplot.cpp
valgrind --leak-check=yes ./cplot.out eg1.dat eg1.eps

The eg1.dat file I used is the one on page 3 of the CPLOT documentation. Below is the output from valgrind:

==1594== Memcheck, a memory error detector
==1594== Copyright (C) 2002-2010, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==1594== Using Valgrind-3.6.1 and LibVEX; rerun with -h for copyright info
==1594== Command: ./cplot.out eg1.dat eg1.eps
==1594==
In initps: eg1.eps
File processed successfully!
==1594==
==1594== HEAP SUMMARY:
==1594==     in use at exit: 120 bytes in 6 blocks
==1594==   total heap usage: 8 allocs, 2 frees, 824 bytes allocated
==1594==
==1594== 120 (8 direct, 112 indirect) bytes in 1 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 3 of 3
==1594==    at 0x402641D: operator new(unsigned int) (vg_replace_malloc.c:255)
==1594==    by 0x8049224: readCurve() (cplot.cpp:182)
==1594==    by 0x8048D89: main (cplot.cpp:127)
==1594==
==1594== LEAK SUMMARY:
==1594==    definitely lost: 8 bytes in 1 blocks
==1594==    indirectly lost: 112 bytes in 5 blocks
==1594==      possibly lost: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==1594==    still reachable: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==1594==         suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==1594==
==1594== For counts of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -v
==1594== ERROR SUMMARY: 1 errors from 1 contexts (suppressed: 17 from 6)

This program can be improved by changing the return statements in the body of the main for(;;) loop into break statements. By so doing, all the cleanup code can be placed after that loop, just before the program exits. This also prevents the duplication of the cleanup code. The code after the for(;;) loop then becomes:

    // Deallocate all allocated memory
    for (int i=0; i < NCURVES; i++) {
        delete curves[i];
    }

    // Close the file resources
    fclose(in);
    fclose(ps);
    return 0;

The Curve class destructor then becomes:

Curve::~Curve() {
    for (int j=0; j <= degree; j++)
        delete points[j];

    delete [] points;
};

Running Valgrind on the updated program then gives the following output.

==6539== Memcheck, a memory error detector
==6539== Copyright (C) 2002-2010, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==6539== Using Valgrind-3.6.1 and LibVEX; rerun with -h for copyright info
==6539== Command: ./cplot.out eg1.dat eg1.eps
==6539==
In initps: eg1.eps
File processed successfully!
==6539==
==6539== HEAP SUMMARY:
==6539==     in use at exit: 0 bytes in 0 blocks
==6539==   total heap usage: 8 allocs, 8 frees, 824 bytes allocated
==6539==
==6539== All heap blocks were freed -- no leaks are possible
==6539==
==6539== For counts of detected and suppressed errors, rerun with: -v
==6539== ERROR SUMMARY: 0 errors from 0 contexts (suppressed: 17 from 6)

There was another bug in the program since it could attempt to plot control polygons for uninitialized curves because of a missing else. I pushed the trivial fix to that. The program also crashed if the input file specified did not exist because fscanf would try to use a NULL parameter. The fix is a simple NULL check.