alternative valgrind-like support for run-tests along other nice additions View as Markdown

hi,

It has been a long due request to have something similar to valgrind
on Windows. I use a tool since quite some time for C projects and it
becomes so handy that it is now a good choice for testing PHP as well,
DrMemory (http://drmemory.org/)

It works on many other platforms as well and provide some other tools
and options that could be very handy for php as well. It uses their
toolset called DynamoRIO (http://www.dynamorio.org/) which is
amazingly powerful, brings strace for windows as well as many other
niches tools.

I made a quick port for run-tests.php -m using drmemory:

https://gist.github.com/pierrejoye/e53deffb7e069a67fc3f

(master). Draft stage, need cleanup of the log directory. Also willing
to provide a PR to their repo to support --logfile valgrind options
(will hopefully be discussed here
https://github.com/DynamoRIO/drmemory/issues/1853).

Be sure to have drmemory (1.9.x) in your path.

This is only for Windows but I think it could make sense to provide it
for other platforms as well, optionally. It can then allow us to
support other features more easily. I am particularly interested to
see if we can make some use of the fuzzy testing or use it to test our
internals APIs (what we cruelly miss now). I did not test the
performance but they claim to be faster than valgrind.

If there is any interest I can continue the port and make it available
on any supported platforms and create a RFC for it.

If not, I will simply apply the windows port so windows devs
(extension or core) can finally have something like valgrind.

Thoughts, ideas and comments welcome.

Cheers,

Pierre

@pierrejoye | http://www.libgd.org