Oakum is a lightweight cross platform memory leak detection library. It achieves this by overriding new and delete operators in their different flavors to track memory allocations and deallocations. Oakum provides a binary yes/no answer to the question "Do I have any leaks?" as well as detailed information including allocation size, parameters and precise stack trace in which the leaked allocation happened. Oakum is compiled as a static library, which applications should link to.

Oakum requires CMake 3.10.0 or newer and a C++ compiler supporting C++17 standard.

Run CMake to generate build scripts:

git clone https://github.com/DziubanMaciej/Oakum
cd Oakum
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

Additional optional arguments can be passed to the cmake command:

• -D OAKUM_BUILD_EXAMPLES=1 - builds example applications, which use the Oakum library and ilustrate its capabilities.
• -D OAKUM_BUILD_TESTS=1 - builds tests for the Oakum library.
• -D OAKUM_MAX_STACK_FRAMES_COUNT=<value> - overrides maximum number stack frames captured in stack traces. Default is 10.
• -D OAKUM_GENERATE_DOCS=1 - generate HTML documentation from oakum_api.h file using Doxygen.
• -D OAKUM_DOXYGEN_COMMAND=/path/to/doxygen - overrides command used to run Doxygen. By default the docs build scripts rely on PATH variable.

Compile the project

cmake --build .

Applications should statically link to the Oakum library (Oakum.lib on Windows, libOakum.a on Linux) and add source/include to their include paths. Both of these can be handled automatically in CMake projects, which add Oakum library to their source tree:

add_subdirectory(Oakum)

...

add_executable(MyApplication ${SOURCES})
target_link_libraries(MyApplication PRIVATE Oakum)

Although Oakum library is aimed at C++ project, its API is a set of C-style functions to provide better compatibility. The whole API is documented Doxygen-style in oakum_api.h file.

The simplest use-case of the Oakum library is simply a binary information, whether leaks were detected or not. This can be achieved with just 3 API calls. Refer to example/example_simple.cpp for a simple example performing this.

The user can also gather more detailed information such as stack traces of all leaked allocations. Refer to example/example_stack_traces.cpp for a more complex example, which queries all of that data.

It may be useful to use Oakum in your unit tests. Example application example/example_gtest.cpp registers an event listener in Googletest testing framework. The listener uses Oakum to check for memory leaks after each individual executed unit test.