I’ve been a long time advocat of using Valgrind, but I find that it can be of limited use for embedded systems development, or when you are using third-party frameworks such as Qt.

Recently I came across the ”Dark Matter Detector” which the Firefox team use to track leaks with.

The Mozilla team use this tool for trying to classify all of the heap-unclassified bytes, allow each of the memory reporters within the Firefox browser to annotate their memory allocations.

In real life I am working with third-party technologies whose source code we don’t fully have, but yet are very important for the products in general. These technologies are used in such a manner as to allow us to insert some kind of memory tracing mechanisms between them and the system level mechanisms. My idea is to augment these hook points with information that this valgrind plugin would be able to use to try and increase the detail of the information produced.

I’ll keep you informed. ;)