Setting up Valgrind on Mac OS Yosemite

Valgrind is a popular tool for debugging memory leak in C++. By using this tool you will be able to see objects that were forgotten to be freed/deleted, and potential bug from code that Valgrind doesn't like.

Installing Valgrind on older Mac OS is very simple and can be done from brew. However the most recent Mac OS 10.10 (Yosemite), has not been officially supported by Valgrind. Hence to be able to use this, installation must be done manually from their latest svn trunk which is also very simple.

svn checkout svn://svn.valgrind.org/valgrind/trunk

Followed by going into the directory trunk and:

./autogen.sh

make

make install

While running autogen.sh one might get an error saying that aclocal was not found.

./autogen.sh: line 6: aclocal: command not found

error: while running 'aclocal'

In this case the automake needs to be installed prior to running this script. The easiest way to do it is to install from brew, such as:

brew install automake

To start using valgrind:

valgrind --leak-check=full --show-reachable=yes --log-info=leak.log "[your program and args]"

For less detailed information and log to stdout:

valgrind --leak-check=yes "[your program and args]"