Absolutely. Valgrind is the holy grail of C/CPP programming.

I could not agree more. My only complaint about valgrind was that I was not smart enough to figure out how to use it on a FUSE filesystem.

Hopefully at the end you figured it out. one of the option is to set --trace-children to "no".

Will note for future reference.

Definitely.

I write C on a non-valgrind capable platform. It's literally scary what you missed when you take what you think is working properly and throw it through valgrind.

A good discipline also helps. ;)

I paid severe penalties for memory corruption bugs writing C code in the 80's - penalties in the form of vast time spent debugging in a non-memory protected environment, where a crash could and often would scramble your hard disk.

As a result, I developed a lot of defensive habits to ward off these types of problems, such that I don't make those mistakes very often anymore. But once in a while, I still get weird errors, and the first thing I try is running it under valgrind.

Bing, bang, problem found, fixed. I may be not too far off the mark in saying that valgrind may have saved C and C++.