gcc support for memory debuggers (operator delete) ?

[Lassi A. Tuura]

I would suggest simply overriding the standard operator delete, obtain
the call stack within it, and map the returned addresses to source files
and lines.  This is quite doable on a number of modern systems, and with
some cleverness works fast enough that the program won't slow down too much.

We have recently written a small profiler library you can LD_PRELOAD
into any program.  It produces hierarchical performance and memory
allocation profiles; the performance side looks a lot like gprof output,
the memory side gives similar statistics for allocs.   At present it
works only on linux, extension to other platforms is easy (= we know how
to do it, it's just a question of time and interest).

My background is that in our environment a tool that requires intrusive
instrumentation (even if it's just to recompile with different options)
is useless.  It's got to pretty much work by LD_PRELOAD or a similar
mechanism, and with code you can't rebuild.  But then, 99+% of our code
is in dynamically loaded shared libraries; we don't have or care about
statically linked programs.  YMMV.

//lat
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