I was trying to regress a bug at work to make sure it was fixed. The comments in the bug were saying that valgrind was showing some memory leaks. Went through the reproduction steps and saw that the particular leak mentioned in the bug was gone but that valgrind was reporting more leaks. After a discussion with the developer, I see that these other mis-reported leaks are due to a common coding practice. The practice is to not worry about the cleanup of one-time allocations or cleanups on 'exit' calls. Im not sure I agree with the practice because it generates noise for the memory profiling tools, and to me seems a little lazy. For early exits im not sure if there is a good solution to eliminate the noise, but for one-time allocations I believe there is.
The solution to me is in the language and base libraries. Valgrind is tracing calls to specific memory allocation functions if I am not mistaken. I believe a good solution to eliminate some of this type of one time allocation noise is to use a special function for one-time allocations to variables and enforce that in the language. For C++, a type modifier similar to 'const' that would indicate to the compiler that the one-time allocation function should be used to create the object. For C style mallocs or calls to 'malloc' the compiler could enforce the use of the specific malloc function with the modifier to help eliminate memory leak noise. Myron
