Debugging: ACE, Windows, and Memory Leak Detection

November 14, 2008 Code Monkey No Comments

ACE LogoThe Windows development environment provided by VisualStudio has some neat tools for detecting memory leaks in code. You simply #define _CRTDBG_MAP_ALLOC before including your headers, and #include <crtdbg.h> as the last header:

#define _CRTDBG_MAP_ALLOC

// Include header files here

#include <crtdbg.h>

Then, you call _CrtDumpMemoryLeaks() before your application exits. If your program exits at many points, you can alternatively call _CrtSetDbgFlag( _CRTDBG_ALLOC_MEM_DF | _CRTDBG_LEAK_CHECK_DF ) at the beginning of you application, which will cause the leaks to also be printed when it exits. The results are printed to the Debug Window and look like the following:

Detected memory leaks!
Dumping objects ->
C:\PROGRAM FILES\VISUAL STUDIO\MyProjects\leaktest\leaktest.cpp(20) : {18}
normal block at 0×00780E80, 64 bytes long.
Data: < > CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD CD
Object dump complete.

Cool, Huh?! However, some libraries don’t play nice with this, as I explain below.

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C++ Portable Runtime Evaluation

November 1, 2007 Code Monkey No Comments

I recently (June 2007) did an evaluation of C++ portable runtimes for my employer (a large video security company) for use in our system level code. We were looking for a set of libraries that would abstract the operating system (threads, IPC, File I/O, etc) and allow our code to be portable across many architectures and environments. I’ve decided to publish the results of my evaluation here for anyone interested in portable runtimes.
Spoiler: We chose to go with the ACE version 5.4.1.
I initially considered the following runtimes for evaluation:

After considering the criteria we were using for evaluation (see below), I narrowed the field down to 3 candidates:

  • ACE
  • POCO
  • PTypes

I’ve included the selection criteria and evaluation results below. Happy reading.

UPDATE 11/14/2008: Read my post about problems with ACE and debugging memory leaks in Windows.

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