How do you detect/avoid Memory leaks in your (Unmanaged) code?

c++ c memory-leaks
prakash picture prakash · Sep 5, 2008 · Viewed 160.8k times · Source

In unmanaged C/C++ code, what are the best practices to detect memory leaks? And coding guidelines to avoid? (As if it's that simple ;)

We have used a bit of a silly way in the past: having a counter increment for every memory allocation call and decrement while freeing. At the end of the program, the counter value should be zero.

I know this is not a great way and there are a few catches. (For instance, if you are freeing memory which was allocated by a platform API call, your allocation count will not exactly match your freeing count. Of course, then we incremented the counter when calling API calls that allocated memory.)

I am expecting your experiences, suggestions and maybe some references to tools which simplify this.

Answer

Jordi Bunster picture Jordi Bunster · Sep 5, 2008

If your C/C++ code is portable to *nix, few things are better than Valgrind.

Related questions

What is the best free memory leak detector for a C/C++ program and its plug-in DLLs?

I have a .exe and many plug-in .dll modules that the .exe loads. (I have source for both.) A cross-platform (with source) solution would be ideal, but the platform can be narrowed to WinXP and Visual Studio (7.1/2003 in my case). …

Read More
Are memory leaks ever ok?

Is it ever acceptable to have a memory leak in your C or C++ application? What if you allocate some memory and use it until the very last line of code in your application (for example, a global object's destructor)? …

Read More
How to run valgrind with basic c example?

Installation: bzip2 -d valgrind-3.10.1.tar.bz2 tar -xf valgrind-3.10.1.tar then: ./configure make make install or simplier sudo apt-get install valgrind How to run valgrind on that simple program example1.c #include <stdlib.h> int main() { char *x = …

Read More