valgrind

The problem is compounded by the way C++ doesn't play nice with gdb/valgrind.

Note that valgrind trunk now supports OS X 10.10 and 10.11 and it's completely trivial to build.

This will also detect any memory trashing or the like, while being quite fast (compared to valgrind, of course).

My not-so-humble opinion is that valgrind has saved C (and C++) from oblivion, at least for large scale programs.

Boilerplate generators are annoying, and Valgrind is difficult to use, but they're unrefined: they solve problems that are best avoided than solved.

On Linux I need to run my app under Valgrind for leak checking as a separate process.

The main things that Memcheck, the default Valgrind tool, do are: 1.

There's no leak here; the only reason that issue exists is because it makes the valgrind output slightly annoying when run with certain settings.

Then if things are really weird, you can use valgrind.

It's best to be rigorous about it in case you refactor or export the function, and to make sure you get a green light from valgrind.

Note that this needn't mean that the tools themselves run in production: for example, Valgrind is incredibly useful because it finds really nasty, production-grade issues -- even if it is only meaningfully usable in development.

I just built a compiler with --disable-elf-tls and it looks like the leak is still present: $ valgrind./foo ==21255== Memcheck, a memory error detector ==21255== Copyright (C) 2002-2013, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.

Calling Valgrind a "memory leak detector" totally underplays its usefulness.

When this happens I resort to valgrind to find the cause, but to call "leaks" every time you want during development and having it running in a few seconds is a killer feature.

If the uninitialized parts of the structure aren't clobbered from zeros, you can get an accurate diagnostic about that from a tool like Valgrind.

Valgrind will tell you about reading that 100th uninitialized byte.

A quick glance at the chapter reveals nothing that leaks, and the program itself is Valgrind-clean except for a single allocation from dlopen in the thread internals.