A heap of trouble

[BS-er]

Well I'm starting to encounter some of the nastier programming bugs: heap corruption.  I've been spare the pain of it (as far as I know) until now.  It's insidious because the true culprit might be extremely difficult to find.  Sometimes you're lucky and the debugger catches the code in the act, but that's usually when the bug is fatal right away.  If the damage has no perceivable impact at first, the bug can stay hidden, while making some other piece of code look bad.

It might be time to invest in some fancy tools to catch such bugs.  Boundschecker is a well known tool for detecting all types of memory glitches but it's a good chunk of change for the pro version.  Maybe there are equally useful solutions at a more tolerable price.

It also may do some good to slow down a bit and do a code review.

[Commando]

Wow, $4k to $6k.  That is definately expensive.  No wonder GSH hasn't used something similar for bz2.

[JonathanS]

Ouch. Really bad ouch.