Purify is a
memory debugger program used by
software developers to detect memory access errors in programs, especially those written in
C or
C++. It was originally written by
Reed Hastings of
Pure Software. Pure Software later merged with Atria Software to form Pure Atria Software, which in turn was later acquired by
Rational Software, which in turn was acquired by
IBM, and then divested to UNICOM Systems, Inc. on Dec 31, 2014. It is functionally similar to other memory debuggers, such as
Insure++,
Valgrind and
BoundsChecker.