[Gc] a problem with msvc_dbg.c

[Glauco Masotti]

Hello again to everybody.

After the solution of the problem of 10 days ago, I took  the occasion of having the latest version compiled with 
GC_DEBUG, to check my code for possible hidden errors.
In fact there was one: I was getting a warning from the GC for the presence of a "smashed" object. This caused no 
apparent malfunction, nevertheless it was alarming.
If I haven't overlooked something, "smashed" objects (and how to deal with them) are not cited in the documentation, 
however I assume that they become so because they are erroneously overwritten. So a combination of the techniques 
suggested for other cases could be applied to catch them. Is this right?

Well, compiling the CG with: GC_DEBUG and KEEP_BACK_PTRS, I got the message:

GC_check_heap_block: found smashed heap objects:
00FE2EFC in or near object at 00FE2EA0(..\sources\nrutils.c:48, sz=88)

This was not enough to identify the object however, because I have many objects of that size.

Adding GC_ASSERTIONS and GC_PRINT_VERBOSE_STATS, in this case, is almost useless.

I was more positive with SAVE_CALL_CHAIN, but I had difficulties in compiling  msvc_dbg.c ('ULONG_PTR' : undeclared 
identifier, etc.), which defines the required functions backtrace(..) and backtrace_symbols(..).
Thus I modified the code, brutally defining:

  typedef ULONG     ULONG_PTR ;

but perhaps something finer should be done.
In any case it worked, and I got the call chain, thus identifying the exact object being overwritten. In fact its 
allocation was incorrect, I had to increase its size by one element.

The author of msvc_dbg.c,  Andrei Polushin, or Hans himself, may want to re-look at the code in order to solve more 
properly the compilation problems that I had. I am using VC++ 6.0 on a Win32 machine with XP SP3 (still happy with this 
old stuff :-).

Best regards,
--- Glauco Masotti