suiveur

This library builds on ideas from Angi Yaghi's memory tracker. It provides several utilities to track the use of raw pointers, printing "rust style" errors when used incorrectly. This allows you to use unsafe allocation without worrying about incorrect usage.

Example usage

int* iptr = REGISTER_ALLOC(new int { 77 });
float* fptr = REGISTER_ALLOC(new float { 6.9f });
double* dptr = new double { 5.5 };  // untracked

/* double free */
SAFE_DELETE(iptr);
SAFE_DELETE(iptr);
/* free of punned pointer */
SAFE_DELETE((char*)fptr);
/* free of untracked pointer */
SAFE_DELETE(dptr);

Docs

Functions

Suiveur defines several macros that can be used for tracking:

T* REGISTER_ALLOC(T*);
T* REGISTER_DELETE(T*);
T* SAFE_DELETE(T*);

void RESET_REGISTRY();
void PASS_REGISTRY();

REGISTER_ALLOC and REGISTER_DELETE will add/remove pointers from the tracking list. Using REGISTER_DELETE will not error on invalid usage.

On the other hand, SAFE_DELETE will. It will warn you when you attempt to delete an untracked pointer, when you free a pointer multiple times, or when you free a pointer that has been punned.

RESET_REGISTRY will completely wipe the list of tracked pointers, printing any errors that have occured. If any pointers have not been freed at the point of calling, they will be considered unfreed.

PASS_REGISTRY will just wipe the list of deleted pointers, meaning it will not be able to detect things such as double frees for previously tracked pointers. It will not warn you about pointers that are still unfreed.

Cmake

Suiveur also provides 2 cmake settings: enable_tracking and disable_ansi. The former will turn on tracking, the functions are noops otherwise. The latter will turn off colored printing, as certain consoles do not support ansi escape codes. Both are OFF by default.

Notes

Because this library was originally made to track AST nodes (single objects), the tracking of new[] is currently unsupported. Attempting to use it will result in UB. Support may be added in the future, but it would probably be better for you to just use a std::vector or a std::unique_ptr.

Big thanks to Rald for coming up with the name :)