Briefly mentioned elsewhere in the comments, but C++11 had a similar issue around the transition from a copy-on-write (COW) to a small-string-optimization (SSO) implementation for std::string. If any type is more ubiquitous than std::string, I don't know what it could be, but the transition was reasonably painless, at least in my shop.
If you're using dynamic linking, the following two tools will come in very handy:
- pldd (https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/pldd.1.html) shows the actual dynamic libs linked into a running process. (Contrast this with ldd, which shows what the dynamic libs would be based on the current shell environment).
We've open-sourced the tools we use to run valgrind (and ASAN) on large mixed C++/Java code bases. The JVM in particular triggers a slew of errors which can make filtering valgrind output impractical, but the scripts we developed can handle that. FWIW, we use these tools every day on the code that goes into NYFIX Marketplace (https://www.broadridge.com/financial-services/capital-market...).
I thought it was a brilliant design, but it was dog-slow on hardware at the time. I keep hoping someone would revive the design for current silicon, would be a good impedance match for modern languages, and OS's.