Memory leak checking using Instruments on Mac

Question

I\'ve just been pulling my hair out trying to make Instruments cough up my deliberately constructed memory leaks. My test example looks like this:

class Lea         


        

Answer 1

Instruments, in Leaks mode can be really powerful for leak tracing, but I've found that it's more biased towards event-based GUI apps than command line programs (particularly those which exit after a short time). There used to be a CHUD API where you could programmatically control aspects of the instrumentation, but last time I tried it the frameworks were no longer provided as part of the SDK. Perhaps some of this is now replaced with Dtrace.

Also, ensure you're up to date with Xcode as there were some recent improvements in this area which might make it easier to do what you need. You could also keep the short delay before exit but make it conditional on the presence of an environment variable, and then set that environment variable in the Instruments launch properties for your app, so that running outside Instruments doesn't have the delay.