For Immediate Release
Barry Software Releases Public Alpha of BugSpray for Mac OS X
May 9, 2002: Barry Software announces the immediate availability of a
public alpha of BugSpray, the new automated debugging tool for Carbon Mac
OS X developers.
WHAT IS BUGSPRAY?
BugSpray is an automated debugging tool – instead of waiting for your
program to crash, BugSpray closely monitors the executable code and catches
problems at the exact point they occur – rather than at the point that the
computer crashes – which can be completely unrelated.
BugSpray specializes in the hard to find memory errors, involving
out-of-bounds memory accesses, accessing stale memory blocks – the sorts of
errors that can take weeks to nail down, or only appear in non-easily
reproducible situations (e.g. during a demo to your most important client).
While the memory protection of Mac OS X is great for catching NULL pointers
and those uninitialized pointers that allowed you to crash other programs
(or the OS), it still allows corrupting your own data, usually by
corrupting your heap – which can be the most difficult errors to pinpoint.
BugSpray uses a technique called ‘instrumentation’, allowing it to monitor
every memory access your program makes which combined with an accurate map
of all of the memory blocks in use by your program, allows BugSpray to
validate memory accesses far more precisely than the processor’s MMU.
COMPATIBILITY
BugSpray requires Mac OS X v10.1or greater, and is restricted to debugging
Carbon Mach-O applications. (Project Builder or Mach-O CodeWarrior(TM)
projects)
AVAILABILITY
Copies of BugSpray are available for downloading at
http://www.barrysoftware.com/BugSpray.html
The alpha builds of BugSpray can be downloaded for free, but will expire
each month. BugSpray has an expected US retail price of $149.95, which will
include all upgrades and support for a year.
ABOUT BARRY SOFTWARE
Barry Software is headed by Andrew Barry, a premier developer of Macintosh
development tools – including begin the original developer of
Spotlight(TM), the acclaimed automated debugging tool for Mac OS 9, as well
as being the original developer of REALbasic(TM), the award winning BASIC
development environment for Mac OS 9/OS X.