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Subject: Re: How stable is stable enough for you?

Author: Uri Blass

Date: 11:49:05 07/24/03

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On July 24, 2003 at 14:11:07, Tom Likens wrote:

>On July 24, 2003 at 03:09:52, Albert Bertilsson wrote:
>
>>After tracing a bug in Sharper for over a week I was starting to loose hope...
>>A ran 600 games with a debug version, no problem.
>>Switched to release version, after 579 games the bastard hanged =(.
>>
>>Would you consider releasing this engine version bad policy?
>>
>>Have you any known bug in your engine that you simply do not care about because
>>it occurs very rarely?
>>
>>I realize that it will not be easier to find the bug later, it's just that I
>>don't have the stamina to try and reproduce it again with the debug version, it
>>can take thousands of games =(
>>
>>As I write Sharper mainly to let it compete against other engines I have no
>>problem with giving away that one point in a thousand games, but I wouldn't like
>>to see Sharper excluded from tournaments because it's buggy.
>>
>>/Regards Albert
>
>If you're running under Windows you might try BoundsChecker from CompuWare
>or PC-Lint from Gimpel.  If you do get PC-Lint and you are linting C++ code
>I would recommend trying to get the older 7.5 version, since 8.0 was a
>complete rewrite and from what I understand is still a bit buggy.  CompuWare
>will give you a 14-day trial of BoundsChecker, if you ask nicely ;)
>
>A free tool worth trying is Valgrind (not sure if it runs under Windows,
>but I know it definitely runs under Linux and works just fine on C++).
>
>good luck,
>--tom

I have BoundsChecker from CompuWare but I use it only as another tool to help me
to find more bugs because there are cases when everything seems to be ok but
there is still a bug.

The problem is that with checkingbounds from compuware movei runs more than
10,000 times slower so most of my tests are without compuware.

A lot of errors are also not crashes because before I use a new array that I
added I check some conditions about the array and I simply ask the program to
print some information in the screen if the condition does not happen because I
know that there is a good probablility that the array does not have the right
information because of a bug.

Often the first error happens only after a second of search of the release
version and using compuware means that I need to wait many hours for the same
purpose.

Uri



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