Debug new

Debug_new refers to a technique in C++ to overload and/or redefine operator new and operator delete in order to intercept the memory allocation and deallocation calls, and thus debug a program for memory usage. It often involves defining a macro named DEBUG_NEW, and makes new become something like new(__FILE__, __LINE__) to record the file/line information on allocation. Microsoft Visual C++ uses this technique in its Microsoft Foundation Classes. There are some ways to extend this method to avoid using macro redefinition while still able to display the file/line information on some platforms.

There are many inherent limitations to this method. It applies only to C++, and cannot catch memory leaks by C functions like malloc. However, it can be very simple to use and also very fast, when compared to some more complete memory debugger solutions.

See also

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Wednesday, October 23, 2013. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.