Debugging Memory on Linux

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57 pointsfruneau3 comments

asan being less feature complete than memcheck is arguably wrong. if you look at their feature overview https://code.google.com/p/address-sanitizer/wiki/ComparisonO... you'll see that they do detect stack oob and global oob (buffer overflows), and some use after return. being 10-20x faster also helps, that rarely someones uses valgrind (we found a lot of bugs even valgrind would have detected, if someone would have tried), but you can ship betas compiled with asan.

I do agree. That ASan part of the article starts with the following sentence: "The tradeoff however is that ASan won’t detect errors such as uses of uninitialized variables or leaks that memcheck can detect, but on the other hand it can detect more errors related to static or stack memory."

Only the runtime part is considered to be less feature-complete that valgrind (because the runtime part of ASan only keeps information about allocated memory, not about memory initialization). It is compile-time instrumentation that make it possible to detect stack and global oob.

I see, right.

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