International Business Machines Corporation

Kumar Rangarajan

Satish Chandra Gupta

Ishai Rabinovitz

Ziv Glazberg

Jonathan Michael Sanders

Tanuj Vohra

A method of detecting runtime errors relating to a stack of a computer program can include during compilation of the computer program, inserting dummy variables between declarations in the stack. During execution of the computer program, if at least one of the dummy variables is accessed, a determination can be made that a runtime memory access error has occurred.

Error detection on the stack

Embodiments of the present invention provide a computing system and method to profile a program for finding potential optimization in heap usage by reducing lag and drag in lifetimes of heap memory blocks. The process consists of three steps. First, an instrumentation engine analyzes a given program and inserts additional code at interesting locations to collect needed information. Second, when the instrumented program is executed on a set of test cases, runtime data is collected. Third, since this data is large for a complex and long running program, data is processed to present it to a user in useful ways so that a programmer improves the heap utilization in the program.

Optimizing heap memory usage

This disclosure provides a computing system and method to profile a program for finding potential optimization in heap usage by reducing lag and drag in lifetimes of heap memory blocks. The process consists of three steps. First, an instrumentation engine analyzes a given program, and inserts additional code at interesting locations to collect needed information. Second, when the instrumented program is executed on a set of test cases, runtime data is collected. Third, since this data could be relatively large for a complex and long running program, data is processed to present it to a user in useful ways so that the programmer can improve the heap utilization in the program.

A method and system to identifying the use of dangling pointers in software instrumentation irrespective of the location of the pointer in the memory. The main memory is preferably segmented into three parts defined as a first memory, a version segment and a pointer version segment. By use of the version segment and pointer version stored in the pointer version segment, checksum are made on a pointer version with a version on dereferencing a pointer in the first memory to identify references to a dangling pointer on negative determination. Identified dangling pointer may be reported to the end user.

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Bengaluru, India

Kumar Rangarajan