Editing PurifyPlus (section)

==Differences from traditional debuggers==
The ability to detect non-fatal errors is a major distinction between PurifyPlus and similar programs from the usual [[debugger]]s.  By contrast, debuggers generally only allow the programmer to quickly find the sources of fatal errors, such as a program crash due to dereferencing a null [[pointer (computer programming)|pointer]], but do not help to detect the non-fatal memory errors.  Debuggers are useful for other things that PurifyPlus is not intended for, such as for stepping through the code line by line or examining the program's memory by hand at a particular moment of execution.  In other words, these tools can complement each other for a skilled developer.

PurifyPlus also includes other functionality, such as high-performance [[Breakpoint|watchpoints]], which are of general use while using a debugger on one's code.

Using PurifyPlus makes the most sense in programming languages that leave memory management to the programmer.  Hence, in [[Java (programming language)|Java]], [[Lisp programming language|Lisp]], or [[Visual Basic]], for example, automatic memory management reduces occurrence of any [[memory leak]]s. These languages can however still have leaks; unnecessary references to objects will prevent the memory from being re-allocated. IBM has a product called Rational Application Developer to uncover these sorts of errors.