Clang with -faddress-sanitizer on Windows

Question

My intent is to use Clang as a replacement for Valgrind on Windows to find buffer overflows, dynamic memory misuse etc. in C/C++ programs that I've written. I have successfully built Clang following the instructions provided here.

I attempted to compile a simple C program with the -faddress-sanitizer option (as specified here) and the following the error is thrown -

gcc.exe: error: unrecognized command line option '-faddress-sanitizer'
Using built-in specs.
COLLECT_GCC=C:/MinGW/bin/gcc.exe
Target: mingw32
Configured with: ../gcc-4.7.0/configure --enable-languages=c,c++,ada,fortran,objc,obj-      c++ --disable-sjlj-exceptions --with-dwarf2 --enable-shared --enable-libgomp --disable-win32-registry --enable-libstdcxx-debug --disable-build-poststage1-with-cxx --enable-version-specific-runtime-libs --build=mingw32 --prefix=/mingw
Thread model: win32
gcc version 4.7.0 (GCC)
clang: error: assembler (via gcc) command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)

Why is clang (as I understand it) invoking GCC? Of course GCC does not support the -faddress-sanitizer option.

I am really excited at the possibility of using this as I've been trying to find a good (free) substitute for Valgrind for a while. Can someone please help?

Answer 1

AddressSanitizer works much better on Windows these days (but it's still a bit of a work-in-progress). There's some documentation at https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/AddressSanitizerWindowsPort

Answer 2

Googling brought me to this page.

To quote,

AddressSanitizer is supported on

• Linux x86_64 (tested on Ubuntu 10.04).
• MacOS 10.6 and 10.7 (i386/x86_64).

Support for Linux i386/ARM is in progress (it may work, but is not guaranteed too).

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On the topic of replacement, have you looked at Dr. Memory?