This is a tool that can be used to detect usage of the global or system versions of operator new() and operator delete() (and their other allocating variants). This tool is useful for finding and preventing calls that go around a library‘s or application’s custom allocator.

TODO

• Support malloc() and free()
• Filtering for false positives
• Support std::make_unique(), std::make_shared(), and other allocating library functions

To run

./alloc-linter-tool /path/to/source/cluster.cpp -- -I/some/include/directory
In file included from .../Code/cpp-driver/src/cluster.cpp:17:
In file included from .../Code/cpp-driver/src/cluster.hpp:20:
In file included from .../Code/cpp-driver/src/config.hpp:20:
In file included from .../Code/cpp-driver/src/auth.hpp:22:
In file included from .../Code/cpp-driver/src/host.hpp:22:
.../Code/cpp-driver/src/copy_on_write_ptr.hpp:85:7: error: Using `operator delete()` from /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/7.3.0/../../../../include/c++/7.3.0/new:124:6
      delete ref;
      ^
.../Code/cpp-driver/src/copy_on_write_ptr.hpp:74:54: error: Using `operator new()` from /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/7.3.0/../../../../include/c++/7.3.0/new:120:7
      ptr_ = SharedRefPtr<Referenced>(new Referenced(new T(*(temp->ref))));
                                                     ^
.../Code/cpp-driver/src/copy_on_write_ptr.hpp:85:7: error: Using `operator delete()` from /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/7.3.0/../../../../include/c++/7.3.0/new:124:6
      delete ref;

Note: Includes and other compiler flags can be specified after --

To run in a cmake project

mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_CLANG_TIDY=/path/to/tool/alloc-linter-tool ..
make

Dependencies

Requires LLVM and clang (w/ clang's libtooling)

On Ubuntu

sudo apt install libclang-6.0-dev

To build

mkdir build && cd build
LIBCLANG_ROOT_DIR=/path/to/llvm/clang cmake ..
make