Programs & Techniques for finding when a Pointer goes out of scope

Question

I am a Software intern working on a large project in C++, & I am also a One man team. Daunting (is that how u spell it :P), yes it is, but also fun.

I am running into c++ pointers that end up pointing to NULL (not because the memory is freed/deleted but because, well I dont really know, but I suspect its because the objects I point to are updated, thus the originally assigned pointer doesn't point to the correct memory address.

As you can see I am confused myself, which is why I want to know of techniques or free programs that assist me in determining WHEN & WHERE a pointer points to null or falls out of scope (dangling pointers? is that whats happening).

Maybe I can just use a simple ASSERT call to determine when a pointer is null?

More info: Right now my problem is that I have a class that has member variables that are pointers. They are initialised in the constructor & by the end of the constructor those pointers points to correct objects. But in reactions to events, when I look at these pointers they are null/out of scope. I can determine this because 1. the program crashes & 2 the eclipse debugger shows them as red hollow circles (I think that means that point to NULL or are out of scope?).

Answer 1

I would suggest two different tools:

• Cppcheck is a static analyser that looks at your source code and tries to identify problems (with pointers, and with a lot of other things too).

• Valgrind is a runtime tool that watches all the allocations and deallocations your program performs, and ensures that they are all correct.