from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
aard
<programming, tool> (Dutch for "earth") A tool to check memory
use for {C++} programs, written by Steve Reiss
<[email protected]> (who names his programs after living
systems).
Aard tracks the state of each byte of memory in the {heap} and
the {stack}. The state can be one of Undefined,
Uninitialised, Free or Set. The program can detect invalid
transitions (i.e. attempting to set or use undefined or free
storage or attempting to access uninitialised storage).
In addition, the program keeps track of heap use through
{malloc} and {free} and at the end of the run reports memory
blocks that were not freed and that are not accessible
(i.e. {memory leaks}).
The tools works using a spliced-in {shared library} on
{SPARCs} running {C++} 3.0.1 under {SunOS} 4.X.
(ftp://wilma.cs.brown.edu/pub/aard.tar.Z).
(1998-03-03)