Memory-Allocators VS sanitizers

Hey everyone! I recently created some memory allocators as a part of a mini-project. It's primarily made for educational purposes on this topic but if anyone is interested in using them and/or providing feedback here is a link to the repository. Thank you:)

ASAN also checks for memory leaks like valgrind, the main difference with the tools is whether you can recompile all of libraries to get the compiler support for detection or whether binary instrumentation is better (https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/AddressSanitizerLe...)

I like Valgrind, but day-to-day, I find myself typically reaching for Sanitizers[1] instead (ASan, et. al.), especially since they're built-in to many compilers these days, and are a bit faster IME.

Are there any use cases that people here have experienced where Valgrind is their first choice?

[1] https://github.com/google/sanitizers

Use address sanitizers

While shipping debug symbols is something I recommend and has no side-effects aside from mere file-size (debug symbols are only loaded when used).

[1] https://github.com/google/sanitizers/issues/857

AddressSanitizer is really useful, it's similar to Valgrind but has much lower overhead.

And if you're up for it, I'd further recommend adding some ways to deal with buffer overflows in debug builds. The way I deal with this is by using Address-Sanitizer's manual poisoning api. Bonus point if you leave additional poisoned space between allocations so off by one errors are likely to end up in a poisoned region instead of nearby allocation.

It also doesn't hurt that Miri can find many kinds of unsafe violations even in unsafe blocks. Zig may get something like this one day, but even if it does, checking things at runtime is not a substitute for compile time -- the C++ Sanitizers haven't exactly solved the safety story for C++ even over a decade later.

This is where stuff like ASan is really useful.