Undefined behaviour

Undefined behaviour is the bane of software written in C++. When a compiler detects undefined behaviout in a piece of code it may consider this a "license to kill" - if the behaviour of the software is undefined it may do anything.

As it turned out, there were a few places in Viua that triggered undefined behaviour. UB was discovered by undefined behaviour sanitiser in bytecode encoding and decoding code - it was caused by misaligned loads and stores.

The fix was simple: do not load values directly, but use std::memcpy().

Leak sanitiser

A second attempt at hardening Viua VM code was inclusion of leak sanitiser. As an extra to Valgrind testing, leak sanitiser should provide an additional layer of verification that Viua manages memory correctly.

Preventing leaks is important for virtual machines. Being a platform for building software, they should be as tight as possible - ideally they should carefully dispose of every single byte they allocate.

Careful memory management makes it easier to find bugs when they arise. If the platform manages resources correctly then any unbounded growth must be due to bugs in the client software.

Is tail recursion used instead of normal recursion? Are processes terminating properly, or are they waiting for some conditions that never become true? Are data structures used suitable for the problem being solved?

These are just example questions one might ask when confronted with a bug. But when the platform is tight and can be trusted, then that means there is one less place for the bug to hide.