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I used Purify back in the day, and while it worked well, getting it working was a royal PITA. IIRC it was necessary to recompile EVERYTHING with Purify.

Anyway, I would think the gold standard these days is clang's Address Sanitizer (https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/AddressSanitizer). clang/ASAN also runs on Mac in addition to Linux.

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Having never used Purify back in the day, I really wonder, do you think address sanitizer is an adequate or better replacement for Purify?

It's been a while, but IIRC ASAN catches most/all of the memory-related errors that Purify did.

Purify did have a debugger-like GUI that would break on errors, which could be handy.

valgrind can also do most of the same checks, but is much slower.

On my team we use both

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