blueness@gentoo.org
Anthony G. Basile
Valgrind is a GPL'd tool to help you find memory-management problems
in your programs. When a program is run under Valgrind's supervision,
all reads and writes of memory are checked, and calls to
malloc/new/free/delete are intercepted. As a result, Valgrind can
detect problems such as
- Use of uninitialised memory
- Reading/writing memory after it has been free'd
- Reading/writing off the end of malloc'd blocks
- Reading/writing inappropriate areas on the stack
- Memory leaks -- where pointers to malloc'd blocks are lost forever
- Passing of uninitialised and/or unaddressible memory to system calls
- Mismatched use of malloc/new/new [] vs free/delete/delete []
- Some abuses of the POSIX Pthreads API