Message-Id:	<199808241456.KAA17618@delorie.com>
Date:	Mon, 24 Aug 1998 13:53:30 -0400
To:	djgpp-announce AT delorie DOT com, "J.J. Alcolea" <a920101 AT zipi DOT fi DOT upm DOT es>
From:	Peter Palotas <blizzar AT hem1 DOT passagen DOT se>
Subject:	ANNOUNCE: MSS version 1.1
Mime-Version:	1.0

The purpose of this message is to announce the release of
MSS - Memory Supervision System version 1.1

MSS Version 1.1 has a few new features and a lot of bugs corrected
that were present in version 1.0 Beta.

MSS version 1.1 can be downloaded from:

http://hem1.passagen.se/blizzar/mss/index.html

And it should also be present on simtelnet in a few days in the 
directory /pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2tk/mss11.zip.

(MSS is however not a DJGPP specific package, it should work
with any ANSI compliant compiler out there).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

A small piece of the Introduction section of the documentation follows:

During the development of C/C++ programs dynamic memory is often allocated
using either the standard C malloc family of functions or the C++ operators
new and delete. When allocating and using dynamical memory, the programmer
often make mistakes which might lead to errors during program execution, so
called bugs. This could be that the program "forgets" to delete/free some
memory (so called memory leaks), tries to access more memory than it
allocated and a lot more. Discovering and tracking these errors is a very
difficult task, and often the errors go by without the programmer noticing
them because the program may appear to work correctly anyway. Therefore MSS
was developed, to assist programmers in detecting such bugs and producing
better programs.

MSS is a free (GPL) C/C++ library that helps you in the infamious task of
finding bugs related to dynamical memory during the development of your
programs. With MSS you will easily be able to detect the following bugs in
your programs:

  * Memory leaks
  * Use of uninitialized memory
  * Zero-length allocations
  * Out of range block accesses
  * Bogus or repeated deallocations
  * Unsuccessful allocations
  * "Wild" or corrupted pointers
  * And more...

MSS can also give you a lot of information about the state of the dynamical
memory allocated by your program at any point during the execution, for
example:

  * Total allocated memory
  * Maximum allocated memory since program start
  * Number of specific allocation/deallocation functions successfully
    called
  * Number of blocks allocated
  * List of blocks allocated, including the module, function and line
    number where the allocation took place.

MSS is also very easy to use. Your current sources will only require minor
changes, to enable the usage of MSS.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

MSS was written using GCC 2.7.2.1, and has also been tested using GCC
2.8.0, and it compiles without any problems on these compilers. This also
goes for the excellent DJGPP, the DOS port of GCC. If your compiler is a
32-bit compiler for the i386 family of processors, building MSS should be
no problems, other platforms are untested, but any reports of successful
(or unsuccessful) usage of MSS are very welcome.

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