Invitation to Hack

SMARTALLOC is not intended to be a panacea for storage management problems, nor is it universally applicable or effective; it’s another weapon in the arsenal of the defensive professional programmer attempting to create reliable products. It represents the current state of evolution of expedient debug code which has been used in several commercial software products which have, collectively, sold more than third of a million copies in the retail market, and can be expected to continue to develop through time as it is applied to ever more demanding projects.

The version of SMARTALLOC here has been tested on a Sun SPARCStation, Silicon Graphics Indigo2, and on MS-DOS using both Borland and Microsoft C. Moving from compiler to compiler requires the usual small changes to resolve disputes about prototyping of functions, whether the type returned by buffer allocation is char * or void *, and so forth, but following those changes it works in a variety of environments. I hope you’ll find SMARTALLOC as useful for your projects as I’ve found it in mine.

See also

• Installing SMARTALLOC

• Squelching SMARTALLOC

• Living with Libraries

• SMARTALLOC Details

• When SMARTALLOC Is Disabled

• The alloc() Function

• Overlays and Underhandedness

• Test and Demonstration Program

Possible Next Steps

Go back to Smart Memory Allocation.

Go back to Developer Guide.