What's the status of this project?

[jcs090218]

This project hasn't been updated since 2017. Is this abandoned? I think many people want to know what happened to this project.

Thanks!

[KindDragon]

Hello,

I apologize for the lack of clear communication regarding the status of the Visual Leak Detector project. I understand that many of you have been wondering about its status.

To clarify, I have not been actively maintaining this project since 2017 due to my current focus on Linux development. I understand that this project is valuable to many users, and I deeply appreciate your support and interest.

I've recently updated the README.md file on the project's GitHub page to reflect this status. I am currently seeking maintainers who would be interested in contributing to and maintaining this project. If you or anyone you know might be interested, I would be more than happy to discuss it further.

Again, I apologize for any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused and thank you for your understanding and continued support.

[jcs090218]

Thank you! and I greatly appreciate your work on vld these years! ❤️ I'm happy to see people move on and continue to work on something else they are interested in. I guess everything comes to an end, so does vld.

I would like to help maintain this project, but without some guidance, it might be hard for me to do so. 😓 What do people need to do as a maintainer? 🤔 Thanks!

[KindDragon]

Hello @jcs090218,

Thank you for your kind words and your interest in maintaining the Visual Leak Detector project! Your willingness to help is greatly appreciated.

I want to mention that English is not my native language, so I'm using ChatGPT to help me write this message. However, I have proofread everything to ensure it accurately represents my thoughts and intentions.

As a maintainer, your responsibilities would primarily include:

1. Understanding the Codebase: Familiarize yourself with the existing codebase and understand the functionality of the project. This is crucial for maintaining the same quality level.

2. Addressing Issues: Users may report bugs or request features through GitHub issues. As a maintainer, you would need to review these issues, reproduce the bugs, and work on fixes or improvements.

3. Reviewing Pull Requests: Other contributors may submit changes to the project via pull requests. You would need to review the code changes, test them, and merge them into the project if they're appropriate.

4. Releasing New Versions: When enough changes have accumulated, or a significant feature has been added or bug fixed, you would create a new release of the project. This involves updating the version number, tagging the release in Git, and possibly creating release notes to summarize the changes.

5. Communicating: Part of maintaining a project is responding to questions from users and discussing potential changes with me and other contributors if anybody else join project.

I understand that this might seem overwhelming, especially if you're new to maintaining an open-source project. Please note that while I'm more than willing to provide guidance during the transition period to help you get comfortable with the process, there might be some delay in my responses as I'm currently busy with work. I appreciate your understanding and patience.

Again, thank you for your willingness to help. Please let me know if you have any more questions or if there's anything specific you'd like to know or discuss.

[z16166]

There are some forks of this project, such as:
https://github.com/GermanAizek/VisualLeakDetector-NG/

[avadae]

Hi, @KindDragon

I wasn't sure how I should "reach out" so I take this issue :)

I am an active user of VLD. I have used it in past game development projects and currently I am teaching future game developers. One of the requirements that I have for my students is that their projects have zero leaks. I use VLD for that purpose; students integrate VLD in their projects to ensure there are no leaks in their submission. I have a tool that checks every submission my students make.

My use case at the moment is simple: students need to install VLD, they include vld.h and I mandate that no leaks are reported. The beauty of VLD is that it simply tells them on what line the memory that got leaked was allocated. No more, no less. Love it.

VLD by now on your repo is not usable anymore. Microsoft has their Azure/vld fork which has indeed some nice improvements, however, it still is lacking for what I need. So I decided to work on my own fork, avadae/vld. I am currently adding github actions that build vld and the installer (fully functional on the master branch). On my dev branch I am working to have the unit tests executed as well, however I did convert them to native VSTests.

An extra goal in the future is that this branch can also easily be used via cmake, we are switching to cmake for most of our projects at our university so I'd like to accommodate that as much as possible.

I can continue with my personal branch and just be fine, students are required to use my version, my use case is covered. But I just saw your call for maintainers. I am willing to be more involved if that is still of interest to you. I would love for VLD to be more commonly available as a tool because as far as I know there is still no better alternative for MSVC.

If indeed there is interest, let me know how I can contact you directly and we'll see from there.

Kind regards,
Alex

[KindDragon]

Great! You co do few PRs to the project and I would gladly give you maintainer rights after that

[avadae]

Ok, my project is forked from Azure/vld so I'll need to set it up differently. I'll first try to finish that one and then I can do a PR

My main issue at the moment is to get the unit tests back to work so that I can verify that I did not break anything. I have some questions about the tests. Mostly:

• what is the importance of the vldmfc and the comtest project? They are not gtests and it is a bit unclear for me what their purpose is?
• since vld is a dll, what is the purpose of the tests having staticcrt targets? I guess we'll never link statically with vld?