Running unit tests under valgrind

[Christian Stimming]

Am Montag, 21. Mai 2012, 13:30:11 schrieb John Ralls:
> On May 21, 2012, at 11:36 AM, Phil Longstaff wrote:
> > I already found one memory leak and one uninitialized variable when
> > running the libqof/qof unit tests under valgrind.  Can we set up all
> > unit tests to run with valgrind automatically?
> I don't think we want to impose the performance hit for doing that by
> default: Unit tests need to run quickly so that they're used after every
> change. A 20X slowdown would mean that nobody would use them.
> 
> What's more, ISTM leaks in unit tests aren't a big deal anyway. Unit test
> programs are small and exit almost immediately. A leak will do no harm at
> all. (Some of the "make check" tests are another matter entirely.)
> 
> As for uninitialized variables, the compiler will find those if you build
> with -Wall -Werror. No need to take Valgrind's performance hit for that.

I think Phil's suggestion is a very valid idea in order to find memory leaks 
inside the functions that are being tested. On the other hand, I agree with 
Derek and John in that using valgrind doesn't make much sense as a default 
when running the unittests. Hence, I think it would be good to provide some 
infrastructure for optionally running the tests with valgrind. But it 
shouldn't be added as a normal testing step that needs to be performed by 
everyone who is running the tests.

Regards,

Christian