What Memory Leak Detector Do People Use?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday December 20, 2000 @11:30PM from the finding-the-holes-in-your-code dept.

funnymalloc asks: "A quick search for 'leak' on FreshMeat yields a whole slew of projects/products which claim to help one find and kill memory bugs of various types when using C/C++. ccmalloc, debauch, dmalloc, LeakTracer, libyama, MCheck, MemProf, memwatch and mpr show up on the first page alone. Ideally a product would detect all of the common problems: array over/under runs, write to unallocated memory, write to 'freed' memory, unfreed memory (a leak) etc. And would work with both new/delete and (m)(c)(re)alloc/free. My question is which of these projects/products do people use and like? (and no, Java is not an answer)"

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Java is not the answer... by DeadSea · 2000-12-20 20:37 · Score: 5

When you say that Java is not the answer, you are more right than you may know.
Java does a wonderful job with the simple stuff that you mention. It checks array bounds, does not let you write to unallocated or freed memory, and a slew of other runtime checks. Java however does not eliminate memory leaks.
To be able to be freed (by the garbage collector) an object must have no references. Accidentally keeping references around is a lot easier than you might think and can be a huge source of memory leakage.
Dr. Dobb's has an article about this.
I love Java and I prefer using it for most of my projects, however anybody who tells you that it solves all your memory leak problems is blowing smoke out their ass.