Valgrind and GTK

[Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+gtk mega-nerd com>]

Hi all,

I'm having trouble differentiating between memory leaks in my code and
apparent leaks in GTK when using valgrind.

Even the minimal hello world program from the GTK tutorial:

   http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk-tutorial/stable/c39.html#SEC-HELLOWORLD

when run as follows (suppression file from http://live.gnome.org/Valgrind):

  export G_SLICE=always-malloc
  export G_DEBUG=gc-friendly
  valgrind --tool=memcheck --leak-check=full --leak-resolution=high \
    --num-callers=50 --show-reachable=yes --suppressions=gtk.suppression \
    helloworld > helloworld-vg.txt 2>&1

on Ubuntu 9.10 reports this:

  ==22566== LEAK SUMMARY:
  ==22566==    definitely lost: 1,449 bytes in 8 blocks
  ==22566==    indirectly lost: 3,716 bytes in 189 blocks
  ==22566==      possibly lost: 4,428 bytes in 107 blocks
  ==22566==    still reachable: 380,505 bytes in 7,898 blocks
  ==22566==         suppressed: 35,873 bytes in 182 blocks

If the leak summary of a 100 line demo program shows over 8000 definitely
lost, indirectly lost, possibly lost and and still reachable blocks, how
am I supposed to find the blocks of memory leaking from my code which is
30000 lines?

I would also like to note that this is a problem faced by other libraries
like GNU libc which solved the problem by adding a function __libc_freeres
to free all its program lifetime allocated memory.

I am aware of this bug:

    https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64096

and some of the discussion around it:

    http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2001-November/msg00279.html
    http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2001-November/msg00541.html

but I'm wondering if attitudes might have changed in the almost 10 years
since that bug and thread.

Erik
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/