Memory leak detectors for C?

Question

What memory leak detectors have people had a good experience with?

Here is a summary of the answers so far:

Valgrind - Instrumentation framework for building dynamic analysis tools.

Electric Fence - A tool that works with GDB

Splint - Annotation-Assisted Lightweight Static Checking

Glow Code - This is a complete real-time performance and memory profiler for Windows and .NET programmers who develop applications with C++, C#, or any .NET Framework

Also see this stackoverflow post.

Solution 1

second the valgrind... and I'll add electric fence.

Solution 2

Valgrind under linux is fairly good; I have no experience under Windows with this.

Solution 3

If you have the money: IBM Rational Purify is an extremely powerful industry-strength memory leak and memory corruption detector for C/C++. Exists for Windows, Solaris and Linux. If you're linux-only and want a cheap solution, go for Valgrind.

Solution 4

Mudflap for gcc! It actually compiles the checks into the executable. Just add

-fmudflap -lmudflap

to your gcc flags.

Solution 5

lint (very similar open-source tool called splint)

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