Alright, so I messed around with this thing called “fauxre leaks” today. It’s basically a tool to check for, like, memory leaks in your C/C++ code. I figured I’d give it a shot ’cause, you know, who wants leaky code?
Getting Started
First things first, I had to get my hands on it. I just grab the code from the source. Nothing too crazy, it is just some header files.
Then, I just include “fauxreleaks.h” into my project, and I ready to use it.
My First Test
I whipped up a super simple C program to see if this thing actually worked. Here’s the gist of it:
#include "fauxreleaks.h"
#include
int main() {
int ptr = (int)malloc(sizeof(int));
//Oops I forgot to free the allocated memory here.
return 0;
I compiled it with a simple `gcc myprogram.c -o myprogram`.
Then run the program, and it shows that I forgot to free the memory.
Using it for Real
Okay, so the toy example worked. Time to throw it at something a little more… substantial. I had this older project, a command-line utility, that I always suspected might be leaking memory. I hadn’t really bothered to check, ’cause, well, it was always a “fix it later” kind of thing.
So, I include the “fauxreleaks.h”, and added the define FAUXRE_LEAKS_IMPLEMENTATION in one c file. Compile and run the code!
Bam! Right away, fauxre leaks started spitting out messages. Turns out, I was leaking memory in a few places. Mostly it was just me being sloppy with allocating buffers and not freeing them in some error handling paths. Classic stuff, really.
Fixing the Leaks
The output from fauxre leaks gave me the file names and line numbers where the leaks were happening. That made it pretty easy to track down the offending code. I went through, added the missing `free()` calls, and re-ran the tests. It showed allocated memory and freed memory is matched.
It took a bit of back-and-forth, but eventually, I got the all clear. No more leaks reported! Feels good, man. It’s like cleaning out the garage – you know you should do it, and it feels great when it’s finally done.
Final Thoughts
This fauxre leaks thing is pretty neat. It’s simple to use, it just works.
I’m definitely gonna make this a part of my regular coding routine. It’s way easier to catch these leaks early than to hunt them down later when your program’s crashing randomly.
