home ‣ Valgrind on mac login
As of Mar 27 2009 Valgrind doesn’t officially support mac but a port that is good enough is in progress. You can learn more and monitor the progress by reading Nicholas Nethercote’s blog (main person working on Valgrind mac port).
This post is a summary of how I built Valgrind on Mac (OS X 10.5.6).
Since this involves compiling, you probably need developer tools. I have both XCode and a healthy does of MacPorts dev packages installed. I’m not sure how much you need, but I’m guessing at least gcc, make, autotools.
svn co svn://svn.valgrind.org/valgrind/trunk valgrind cd valgrind ./autogen.sh ./configure make sudo make install
So far I’ve only tried Valgrind on mupdf and it worked, so this is very promising. Valgrind is invaluable tool for C/C++ memory leak detection, detecting memory mismanagement issues and profiling the code.
An unfortunate deficiency is lack of a GUI for inspecting callgrind results (i.e. kcachegrind equivalent on mac). Maybe the cheapest way to get that would be to convert callgrind results to shark format so that shark tools can be used. Should be possible – I believe WebKit’s JavaScript implementation saves profiling results in shark format, so there is code that could be used as a template for that.