Is there a good Valgrind substitute for Windows

Question

I was looking into Valgrind to help improve my C coding debugging when I discovered it is only for Linux - I have no other need or interest in moving my OS to Linux so I was wondering if there is a equally good program for Windows

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i would like to list some tool   hope will be useful  read this article for more detail    Purify  Bounds Checker Coverity  basically its a code analyzer but  it will catch memory leak in static   Glow Code dmalloc ccmalloc NJAMD YAMD Valgrind mpatrol Insure

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As jakobengblom2 pointed out  valgrind has a suit of tools  Depending which one you are talking about there are different windows counter parts  I will only mention OSS or free tools here   1  MemCheck   Dr  Memory  It is a relatively new tool  works very well on Windows 7  My favorite feature is that it groups the same leaks  allocation stacks in the report   http   code google com p drmemory   I have also used UMDH  http   support microsoft com kb 268343   and found it quiet useful and easy to setup  It works from Win2000 to Win7   AppVerifier is a must have swissknife for windows native code developers  its  memory  checker does similar job  http   msdn microsoft com en-us library dd371695 28v vs 85 29 aspx  2  Callgrind   My favorite is verysleepy   http   www codersnotes com sleepy   It is tiny but very useful and easy to use    If you need more features  AMD CodeAnalyst    Performance Analyzer is free  http   developer amd com documentation videos pages introductiontoamdcodeanalystperformanceanalyzer aspx  Windows Performance Analysis tools is free from Microsoft  not very easy to use but can get the job done if you are willing to spend the time  http   blogs microsoft co il blogs sasha archive 2008 03 15 xperf-windows-performance-toolkit aspx Download  http   msdn microsoft com en-us performance cc752957  3  Massif   Similar not quite exact match  free tools on windows are   VMMap from sysinternals   http   technet microsoft com en-us sysinternals dd535533   heap command in windbg   http   hacksoflife blogspot com 2009 06 heap-debugging-memoryresource-leak-with html  4  Cachegrind   Above mentioned Windows Performance Tools has certain level of L2 cache miss profiling capability but not quite as good and easy to use as Cachegrind    5  DRD   Haven t found anything free and as powerful on Windows yet  the only free tool for windows I can find that is slightly close is the  lock  checker in  AppVerifier  http   msdn microsoft com en-us library dd371695 28v vs 85 29 aspx

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As jakobengblom2 pointed out  valgrind has a suit of tools  Depending which one you are talking about there are different windows counter parts  I will only mention OSS or free tools here   1  MemCheck   Dr  Memory  It is a relatively new tool  works very well on Windows 7  My favorite feature is that it groups the same leaks  allocation stacks in the report   http   code google com p drmemory   I have also used UMDH  http   support microsoft com kb 268343   and found it quiet useful and easy to setup  It works from Win2000 to Win7   AppVerifier is a must have swissknife for windows native code developers  its  memory  checker does similar job  http   msdn microsoft com en-us library dd371695 28v vs 85 29 aspx  2  Callgrind   My favorite is verysleepy   http   www codersnotes com sleepy   It is tiny but very useful and easy to use    If you need more features  AMD CodeAnalyst    Performance Analyzer is free  http   developer amd com documentation videos pages introductiontoamdcodeanalystperformanceanalyzer aspx  Windows Performance Analysis tools is free from Microsoft  not very easy to use but can get the job done if you are willing to spend the time  http   blogs microsoft co il blogs sasha archive 2008 03 15 xperf-windows-performance-toolkit aspx Download  http   msdn microsoft com en-us performance cc752957  3  Massif   Similar not quite exact match  free tools on windows are   VMMap from sysinternals   http   technet microsoft com en-us sysinternals dd535533   heap command in windbg   http   hacksoflife blogspot com 2009 06 heap-debugging-memoryresource-leak-with html  4  Cachegrind   Above mentioned Windows Performance Tools has certain level of L2 cache miss profiling capability but not quite as good and easy to use as Cachegrind    5  DRD   Haven t found anything free and as powerful on Windows yet  the only free tool for windows I can find that is slightly close is the  lock  checker in  AppVerifier  http   msdn microsoft com en-us library dd371695 28v vs 85 29 aspx

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Clang supports the Address Sanitizer plugin  -faddress-sanitizer option   which can pretty much detect most bugs that Valgrind can find  does not support detection of uninitialised memory reads and memory leaks yet though   See this page for a comparison against Valgrind and other similar tools  An official Windows port is currently in progress  see Windows ASan port   I attempted to build it myself on Windows a couple of months ago and gave up  see my related question  Things may have changed for the better now if you want to give it another go

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Try Intel s Inspector XE product which can help you detect both memory and threading issues  http   software intel com en-us articles intel-inspector-xe

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Clang supports the Address Sanitizer plugin  -faddress-sanitizer option   which can pretty much detect most bugs that Valgrind can find  does not support detection of uninitialised memory reads and memory leaks yet though   See this page for a comparison against Valgrind and other similar tools  An official Windows port is currently in progress  see Windows ASan port   I attempted to build it myself on Windows a couple of months ago and gave up  see my related question  Things may have changed for the better now if you want to give it another go

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Try DUMA

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Perhaps CodeSnitch would be something you re after  http   www entrek com codesnitch html

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In combination with Visual Studio I generally use Visual Leak Detector or simply  CrtDumpMemoryLeaks   which is a win32 api call  Both are nothing fancy but they get the job done

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I ve been loving Memory Validator  from a company called Software Verification

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Check out this question  Is there a good Valgrind substitute for Windows    Though general substitute for valgrind is asked  it mainly discusses memory leak detectors and not race conditions detections

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I ve been loving Memory Validator  from a company called Software Verification

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More or less all Profilers include checking for memory leaks and show you the stack when the memory was allocated   I can recommend Intels Parallel Inspector  Simple to use and no recompilation needed  The trial version runs for 30 days   GlowCode and AtromatedQA also include such capabilites  They all offer free trials   Compuware DevPartner  aka BoundsChecker  in Contrast needs a slowed down  instrumentation  recompile and the application also runs slower when checking for errors  And BoundsChecker can not work with 64 Bit evsrions at all  We gave up on that tool

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You might want to read what Mozilla is doing regarding memory leaks  One tool in their toolbox is the Hans Boehm garbage collector used as memory leak detector

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Some more good commercial tools    Purify Insure

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Finding Memory leak in C   Application on Windows

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How about the Purify

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If you re not afraid of mingw  here are some links  some might work with MSVC     http   betterlogic com roger  p 1140

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I used Insure   which does excellent job in finding c   memory leaks corruptions and many other bugs like uninitialized variables  pointer errors  strings etc   It also does visual  Code coverage  and run time memory usage etc   which give more confident on your code   You can try it for trail version

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Try Intel s Inspector XE product which can help you detect both memory and threading issues  http   software intel com en-us articles intel-inspector-xe

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I had the chance to use Compuware DevPartner Studio in the past and that was really good  but it s quite expensive  A cheaper solution could be GlowCode  i just worked with a 5 x version and  despite some problems in attaching to a process i needed to debug  it worked quite well

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In combination with Visual Studio I generally use Visual Leak Detector or simply  CrtDumpMemoryLeaks   which is a win32 api call  Both are nothing fancy but they get the job done

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Another memory tool for your list  Memory Validator   Not free  but nowhere near as expensive as Purify or Boundschecker

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Finding Memory leak in C   Application on Windows

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If you are developing with Borland CodeGear Embarcadero C   Builder  you could use CodeGuard

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The free tool DebugDiag will help find memory and handle leaks   You don t need to augument your program for DebugDiag to work   http   www microsoft com downloads details aspx FamilyID 28BD5941-C458-46F1-B24D-F60151D875A3 amp displaylang en  Although it is not the easiest or most intuitive program to use  Make sure you google for tutorials and instructions on how to use it

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The best tool I ever used is DevPartner BoundsChecker - it s not free but it has an evaluation period

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For Visual C    try Visual Leak Detector  When I used it  it detected a memory leak from a new call and returned the actual line in source code of the leak  The latest release can be found at http   vld codeplex com

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Perhaps CodeSnitch would be something you re after  http   www entrek com codesnitch html

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You can take a look to the article Design and Implementation of an In-Game Memory Profiler in the book  Game Programming Gems 8    It shows how to implement a low overhead semi-intrusive real-time memory profiler  source code provided in the CD-ROM

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The Boost Test library can detect memory leaks

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i would like to list some tool   hope will be useful  read this article for more detail    Purify  Bounds Checker Coverity  basically its a code analyzer but  it will catch memory leak in static   Glow Code dmalloc ccmalloc NJAMD YAMD Valgrind mpatrol Insure

User · Answer

Try DUMA

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We are just completing a Memory Safety checking tool for Windows  that handles GCC and Micrsoft Visual C  not C   yet   and are looking for Beta testers   EDIT June 12  2011   Not Beta anymore  now production for GCC and Microsoft Visual Studio C

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See the  Source Test Tools  link on the Software QA Testing and Test Tool Resources page for a list of similar tools   I ve used BoundsChecker DevPartner Studio and Intel V-Tune in the past for profiling  I liked V-Tune the best  you could emulate various Intel chipsets and it would give you hints on how to optimize for that platform

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We are just completing a Memory Safety checking tool for Windows  that handles GCC and Micrsoft Visual C  not C   yet   and are looking for Beta testers   EDIT June 12  2011   Not Beta anymore  now production for GCC and Microsoft Visual Studio C

User · Answer

I ve been loving Memory Validator  from a company called Software Verification

User · Answer

If you re not afraid of mingw  here are some links  some might work with MSVC     http   betterlogic com roger  p 1140

User · Answer

Development environment for Windows you are using may contain its own tools  Visual Studio  for example  lets you detect and isolate memory leaks in your programs

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There is Pageheap exe part of the debugging tools for Windows  It s free and is basically a custom memory allocator deallocator    See http   support microsoft com kb 286470

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The user-mode dump heap  UMDH  utility works with the operating system to analyze Windows heap allocations for a specific process  That s a pretty good tool for free from Microsoft  Here is a mini tutorial  How to use Umdh exe to find memory leaks

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There is Pageheap exe part of the debugging tools for Windows  It s free and is basically a custom memory allocator deallocator    See http   support microsoft com kb 286470

User · Answer

See the  Source Test Tools  link on the Software QA Testing and Test Tool Resources page for a list of similar tools   I ve used BoundsChecker DevPartner Studio and Intel V-Tune in the past for profiling  I liked V-Tune the best  you could emulate various Intel chipsets and it would give you hints on how to optimize for that platform

User · Answer

Some more good commercial tools    Purify Insure

User · Answer

For Visual C    try Visual Leak Detector  When I used it  it detected a memory leak from a new call and returned the actual line in source code of the leak  The latest release can be found at http   vld codeplex com

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Does Jochen Kalmbach s Memory Leak Detector qualify   PS  The URL to the latest version is buried somewhere in the article s comment thread

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If you are developing with Borland CodeGear Embarcadero C   Builder  you could use CodeGuard

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I found this SF project today   http   sourceforge net p valgrind4win wiki Home   They are porting valgrind to Windows  Probably in several years we will have a reliable valgrind on windows

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I had the chance to use Compuware DevPartner Studio in the past and that was really good  but it s quite expensive  A cheaper solution could be GlowCode  i just worked with a 5 x version and  despite some problems in attaching to a process i needed to debug  it worked quite well

User · Answer

See the  Source Test Tools  link on the Software QA Testing and Test Tool Resources page for a list of similar tools   I ve used BoundsChecker DevPartner Studio and Intel V-Tune in the past for profiling  I liked V-Tune the best  you could emulate various Intel chipsets and it would give you hints on how to optimize for that platform

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Definitely Purify  I ve used that to analyze some massive code bases   3 000 kSLOC  and found it to be excellent   You might like to look at this list at Wikipedia   By the way  I ve found memwatch to be useful  Thanks Johan

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Viusual Studio can help detecting memory leaks itself  See Microsoft Visual C   Tips and Tricks -   Memory Leaks  section  See also this post in SO  Although real tracing is only possible with the Team Edtion of Visual Studio

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How about the Purify

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The free tool DebugDiag will help find memory and handle leaks   You don t need to augument your program for DebugDiag to work   http   www microsoft com downloads details aspx FamilyID 28BD5941-C458-46F1-B24D-F60151D875A3 amp displaylang en  Although it is not the easiest or most intuitive program to use  Make sure you google for tutorials and instructions on how to use it

User · Answer

Does Jochen Kalmbach s Memory Leak Detector qualify   PS  The URL to the latest version is buried somewhere in the article s comment thread

User · Answer

Viusual Studio can help detecting memory leaks itself  See Microsoft Visual C   Tips and Tricks -   Memory Leaks  section  See also this post in SO  Although real tracing is only possible with the Team Edtion of Visual Studio

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Parasoft Insure   has always been reliable   http   www parasoft com jsp products insure jsp itemId 63

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LeakDiag  UMDH  App Verifier  DebugDiag  are all useful tools to improve robustness of code and find memory leaks

User · Answer

More or less all Profilers include checking for memory leaks and show you the stack when the memory was allocated   I can recommend Intels Parallel Inspector  Simple to use and no recompilation needed  The trial version runs for 30 days   GlowCode and AtromatedQA also include such capabilites  They all offer free trials   Compuware DevPartner  aka BoundsChecker  in Contrast needs a slowed down  instrumentation  recompile and the application also runs slower when checking for errors  And BoundsChecker can not work with 64 Bit evsrions at all  We gave up on that tool

User · Answer

I had the chance to use Compuware DevPartner Studio in the past and that was really good  but it s quite expensive  A cheaper solution could be GlowCode  i just worked with a 5 x version and  despite some problems in attaching to a process i needed to debug  it worked quite well

User · Answer

Development environment for Windows you are using may contain its own tools  Visual Studio  for example  lets you detect and isolate memory leaks in your programs

User · Answer

I used Insure   which does excellent job in finding c   memory leaks corruptions and many other bugs like uninitialized variables  pointer errors  strings etc   It also does visual  Code coverage  and run time memory usage etc   which give more confident on your code   You can try it for trail version

User · Answer

Why not use Valgrind   Wine to debug your Windows app   See   http   wiki winehq org Wine and Valgrind   Chromium uses this to check the Windows version for memory errors  see   build chromium org and look at the experimental or memory waterfalls  and search for wine    There s also Dr  Memory  see   dynamorio org drmemory html

User · Answer

LeakDiag  UMDH  App Verifier  DebugDiag  are all useful tools to improve robustness of code and find memory leaks

User · Answer

I found this SF project today   http   sourceforge net p valgrind4win wiki Home   They are porting valgrind to Windows  Probably in several years we will have a reliable valgrind on windows

User · Answer

You can take a look to the article Design and Implementation of an In-Game Memory Profiler in the book  Game Programming Gems 8    It shows how to implement a low overhead semi-intrusive real-time memory profiler  source code provided in the CD-ROM

User · Answer

You might want to read what Mozilla is doing regarding memory leaks  One tool in their toolbox is the Hans Boehm garbage collector used as memory leak detector

User · Answer

The best tool I ever used is DevPartner BoundsChecker - it s not free but it has an evaluation period

User · Answer

I ve been loving Memory Validator  from a company called Software Verification

User · Answer

Some more good commercial tools    Purify Insure

User · Answer

Just an idea  you could also implement a memory allocator and track all calls to malloc and free  However this might be too much for some projects

User · Answer

I had the chance to use Compuware DevPartner Studio in the past and that was really good  but it s quite expensive  A cheaper solution could be GlowCode  i just worked with a 5 x version and  despite some problems in attaching to a process i needed to debug  it worked quite well

User · Answer

Just an idea  you could also implement a memory allocator and track all calls to malloc and free  However this might be too much for some projects

User · Answer

You can give a try to RuntimeChecker trial ot to IBM Purify trial    A free solution would be to use the following code in Visual Studio    ifdef  DEBUG  define new DEBUG NEW  endif   Just write this in the top of all your cpp files  This will detect memory leaks of your application whenc stopping debug run and list them in the output window  Double clicking on a memory leaks line will higlight you the line where memory is allocated and never released  This may help you   http   www flipcode com archives How To Find Memory Leaks shtml

User · Answer

Development environment for Windows you are using may contain its own tools  Visual Studio  for example  lets you detect and isolate memory leaks in your programs

User · Answer

See the  Source Test Tools  link on the Software QA Testing and Test Tool Resources page for a list of similar tools   I ve used BoundsChecker DevPartner Studio and Intel V-Tune in the past for profiling  I liked V-Tune the best  you could emulate various Intel chipsets and it would give you hints on how to optimize for that platform

User · Answer

The Boost Test library can detect memory leaks

User · Answer

Perhaps CodeSnitch would be something you re after  http   www entrek com codesnitch html

User · Answer

Some more good commercial tools    Purify Insure

User · Answer

Parasoft Insure   has always been reliable   http   www parasoft com jsp products insure jsp itemId 63

User · Answer

You can give a try to RuntimeChecker trial ot to IBM Purify trial    A free solution would be to use the following code in Visual Studio    ifdef  DEBUG  define new DEBUG NEW  endif   Just write this in the top of all your cpp files  This will detect memory leaks of your application whenc stopping debug run and list them in the output window  Double clicking on a memory leaks line will higlight you the line where memory is allocated and never released  This may help you   http   www flipcode com archives How To Find Memory Leaks shtml

User · Answer

Definitely Purify  I ve used that to analyze some massive code bases   3 000 kSLOC  and found it to be excellent   You might like to look at this list at Wikipedia   By the way  I ve found memwatch to be useful  Thanks Johan

User · Answer

Check out this question  Is there a good Valgrind substitute for Windows    Though general substitute for valgrind is asked  it mainly discusses memory leak detectors and not race conditions detections

User · Answer

Development environment for Windows you are using may contain its own tools  Visual Studio  for example  lets you detect and isolate memory leaks in your programs

User · Answer

The user-mode dump heap  UMDH  utility works with the operating system to analyze Windows heap allocations for a specific process  That s a pretty good tool for free from Microsoft  Here is a mini tutorial  How to use Umdh exe to find memory leaks

User · Answer

Another memory tool for your list  Memory Validator   Not free  but nowhere near as expensive as Purify or Boundschecker

User · Answer

Why not use Valgrind   Wine to debug your Windows app   See   http   wiki winehq org Wine and Valgrind   Chromium uses this to check the Windows version for memory errors  see   build chromium org and look at the experimental or memory waterfalls  and search for wine    There s also Dr  Memory  see   dynamorio org drmemory html

User · Answer

Perhaps CodeSnitch would be something you re after  http   www entrek com codesnitch html

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