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AbdallahTheGreatest
AbdallahTheGreatest

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42PhilosophersHelper: Your New Best Friend for the Philosophers Project!

#programming #bash #beginners #tutorial

Concurrency in C language: The Dining Philosophers Problem

If you're a 42 student, the word "Philosophers" probably brings back some memories. For those who haven't done it, it’s a famous concurrency problem where you simulate philosophers sharing forks (mutexes). The goal is to let them eat without the whole system grinding to a halt in a deadlock. It’s a project notorious for subtle bugs that only appear under very specific, hard-to-reproduce timing conditions.

Your philo passes the obvious tests, but evaluation fails for reasons you can’t reproduce. I built 42PhilosophersHelper after seeing these exact issues in evals. We built 42PhilosophersHelper after seeing these exact issues in evals, and the more people who use and share it, the better it gets at catching these tricky bugs! 42PhilosophersHelper automates the heavy lifting!

We're building this for the community – if you find it useful, sharing it helps us all improve it faster!

TL;DR: Use this GitHub: github.com/AbdallahZerfaoui/42PhilosophersHelper to test your code

Why use it?

  • Mixed logs: Tests if your printfs get scrambled (impossible to see manually with fast philos!)
  • Semi-automated testing for death conditions, meal limits, and invalid inputs
  • Detects threading issues via Helgrind (Docker setup included)
  • Customizable tests – add your scenarios in simple .txt files
  • Time-saver – no more guessing if your philo survives edge cases

Quick Start:

git clone https://github.com/AbdallahZerfaoui/42PhilosophersHelper.git ~/42PhilosophersHelper
chmod +x ~/42PhilosophersHelper/test.sh

echo 'alias philotest="~/42PhilosophersHelper/test.sh"' >> ~/.zshrc && source ~/.zshrc
OR
echo 'alias philotest="~/42PhilosophersHelper/test.sh"' >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc
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Now you can run 42PhilosophersHelper from anywhere! Simply go into your project folder and run:

philotest
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Features you'll love:

  • Default AND custom timers for stress-testing
  • Clear OK/KO results with test summaries
  • Prebuilt test cases + easy expansion

Perfect for:

  • Final checks before evaluation
  • Hunting elusive data races
  • Validating edge cases (e.g., 200 philos, 1ms death timers)

Helgrind Users: Docker integration makes thread debugging painless – highly recommended for catching sneaky concurrency bugs!

GitHub: github.com/AbdallahZerfaoui/42PhilosophersHelper

"Because philosophers should die of hunger, not from your code bugs."

NB1: Contributions welcome! Found a bug or have test ideas? Open an issue/PR. And if you find this tool useful, please share it with your fellow cadets! More users mean more feedback and a faster path to making it even better for everyone.

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