monitor a program's memory usage in Linux

Question

Are there any tools available in Linux which graphically or textually display memory usage for a program? For example, if I write a C++ program and would like to verify that objects are being allocated and deallocated properly in memory, are there applications available that would visually show the objects being instantiated and deleted? When I used to program in Visual Studio, I remember stepping through a program and using a debug pane to monitor memory usage and am looking for something similar to that in Linux.