After many years of working on a general-purpose C++ library using the Microsoft MSVC compiler in Visual Studio, we are now porting it to Linux/Mac OS X (pray for us). I have become accustomed and quite fond of the simple memory leak detection mechanism in MSVC:
#ifdef DEBUG
#define _CRTDBG_MAP_ALLOC
#define NEW new( _NORMAL_BLOCK, __FILE__, __LINE__)
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <crtdbg.h>
#else
#define NEW new
#endif
Every memory allocation is done using this NEW macro. Whenever a process using our library terminates, any memory leaks (blocks that have not been de-allocated) are reported on the console along with the file and line # where the memory was originally allocated.
The part about this that I like is that I don’t have to actively “run with performance tool” or otherwise indicate that I am looking for leaks. Leaks are reported to me in the regular course of development, every time a process terminates.
Now that we are moving to the GCC world, I find that the memory leak detection tools, many of which are quite sophisticated, require that I explicitly indicate that I’m in leak hunting mode. My IDE is Xcode and I’ve looked into some of the allocation/leak detection tools (like Instruments and MallocDebug) but I admit I haven’t spent the time to get my head around them fully yet. I keep getting put off by the fact that I actually have to specify that I’m looking for a leak ahead of time, instead of being alerted to it automatically.
I am using Xcode 3.2 and I hear that there’s now nifty integration with a static analysis tool, but again I haven’t looked into this. I’m looking for some idea of what my options are. Is there a comparable mechanism built into GCC and/or Xcode? Is there a simple third-party library or tool that performs the very basic functionality that I know and love? Or should I suck it up and learn the new way of doing things?
You should have a look at “Cross-Platform Memory Leak Detector“, looks very similar to the crtdbg.h technique.