Anthony Allevato and Stephen Edwards. Dereferee: Instrumenting C++ pointers with meaningful runtime diagnostics. Poster presented at the 39th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. Portland, OR, USA, March 12-15, 2008.

Proper memory management and pointer usage often prove to be the most difficult concepts for students learning C++ to grasp. Compounding this problem is the fact that the compilers and runtime environments traditionally used to introduce these concepts leave much to be desired with regard to generating meaningful diagnostics to assist students in tracking down and fixing memory-related logical errors. To alleviate this, we have developed Dereferee, an advanced yet thin wrapper around C++ pointers that greatly increases the quality of these runtime diagnostics, but with minimal intrusion into students’ code and the learning process.