Finding memory leaks in C code on Windows

Question

I already know that I can trace memory leaks in my code with mtrace and valgrind on Linux, both of which are unavailable for Windows. Which Windows program would you recommend to trace memory leaks?

I'm an Eclipse user and I've been working with C for a month or two now, so I prefer a user-friendly solution over something more advanced.

Answer 1

See Purify and possibly Insecure++

Answer 2

You can use _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks. I suppose it is similar to mtrace.

More info: http://www.codeguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=312742

Answer 3

You can hook up e.g. visual leak detector as described here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/applications/visualleakdetector.aspx

Another way would be to do count the amount of memory used before and after a specific action. Like described here: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa293901%28VS.60%29.aspx Something like this can easily added to e.g. automatic unit tests.

Answer 4

There is a common sense way of doing this, in the lines of C, for every pair of malloc there is a free, if there isn't there's a leak, likewise the same for the GlobalAlloc, VirtualAlloc, HeapAlloc, LocalAlloc, VirtualAllocEx...there's an associated ...Free pair with them, for example running a HeapAlloc on variable 'foo' for example, and there is no HeapFree for 'foo', that is a leak...

Hope this helps, Best regards, Tom.

Answer 5

Application Verifier will do this quite well, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms220948.aspx