Are there any alternatives to valgrind on Mac OS X Mountain Lion and Mavericks to detect memory leaks for C/C++ applications? [closed]

On 2013-11-01, the valgrind team announced Valgrind 3.9.0:

We are pleased to announce a new release of Valgrind, version 3.9.0, available from http://www.valgrind.org.

3.9.0 is a feature release with many improvements and the usual collection of bug fixes. This release adds support for MIPS64/Linux, Intel AVX2 instructions and POWER8 instructions. DFP support has been added for S390. Initial support for hardware transactional memory has been added for Intel and POWER platforms. Support for Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) has been improved. Accuracy of Memcheck on vectorized code has been improved.

It remains to be seen whether the improved Mountain Lion support means it works OK for Mavericks. It does mention that the support is only for 64-bit code.

[...time passeth...downloads happen...hopes are raised...configuration is attempted...hopes are dashed...]

Urgh!

...checking build system type... x86_64-apple-darwin13.0.0checking host system type... x86_64-apple-darwin13.0.0checking for a supported CPU... ok (x86_64)checking for a 64-bit only build... nochecking for a 32-bit only build... nochecking for a supported OS... ok (darwin13.0.0)checking for the kernel version... unsupported (13.0.0)configure: error: Valgrind works on Darwin 10.x and 11.x (Mac OS X 10.6/7)

Mountain Lion is based on Darwin 12.x; Mavericks is based on Darwin 13.x. I'm not sure about the messaging in the error messages, but out of the box, Valgrind 3.9.0 does not compile on OS X Mavericks.

Just so you know, you may not have to wait for long to see Valgrind working on Mac 10.9 a.k.a Maverick. As there has been some success according to this bug report.

It is my opinion that there are currently (as of 15th November 2013) no Valgrind alternatives for the Mac. There are some to keep an eye on though, namely Clang which has both AddressSanitizer (works on current macs) and MemorySanitizer (macs not supported yet).

There are suggestions to use Xcode's Instruments, but I did not find it useful at all.

In addition to the Instruments that @Charlie_Burns mentions above, there's also the static analyzer that can tell you about some of these things just by analyzing your code. In your Xcode project, just select "Analyze" from the "Product" menu. It invokes the clang static analyzer. I think you can use clang directly from the command line if you want, too, though I've not done that.

On the command line you also have access to the leaks command and the dtracecommand.