Finding Memory Leaks (Linux)

QtCreator can be used to find memory leaks using the Analyze mode.  This requires the valgrind program, which can be installed via the valgrind package on Ubuntu based distros.  Unfortunately it looks like this program has not been ported to Windows (MinGW), so Windows developers are out of luck (at least when using MinGW with the Qt SDK).

In order to use valgrind, the program to check must be compiled with debugging information.  To do this with CMake under QtCreator, in the Run CMake dialog, the Arguments line needs to be set to ‑DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug.  This is a nuisance because it needs to be done every time CMake is run the first time and there appears to be no way to automate this inside QtCreator.  So an alternate scheme was devised using CMake (will be described in the next post).

Once Analyze mode is selected (by the icon on the side panel or Ctrl+6), the Analyzer panel will appear.  In this panel, the mode needs to be changed from QML Profiler to Valgrind Memory Analyzer.  The program is started using the start (play) icon (left side of Analyzer panel toolbar).  Once the program ends, any memory issues will be reported.

After using the Analyzer to learn about list element deallocation, I thought it might be a good idea to check the ibcp program for any memory issues.  There is already an implementation to detect token memory leaks accomplished by overloading the new and delete operators for the Token structure, but there are many other memory allocation operations in the program.

So this process was started for each parser, expression and translator test.  For each, the run arguments were set (Projects page, Run Settings) and the Analyzer was run.  This were no memory issues on the parser tests, however, some problems were found on the translator tests, which will be discussed in following posts.