`cmake --build build --target memcheck` runs every registered CTest suite
under valgrind. There are no new test programs, and there should not be any:
tests/benchutil.h notices valgrind in LD_PRELOAD and drops the benchmark
scale to 0.0005, which turns the perf suites into the broadest path coverage
in the tree at a cost valgrind can survive. A benchmark walks one path a
hundred thousand times; a leak check wants every path walked once. Same
binaries, one flag apart, and the whole run is about thirty seconds.
scripts/memcheck.sh wraps `ctest -T memcheck` because that command records
defects and still exits 0, which cannot gate anything. It also forces the
headless drivers, so the vendor GPU stack is never loaded -- that removes
thousands of unfixable findings inside amdgpu_dri.so without suppressing
anything, and it is what the suites are written for anyway. Only definite
losses, invalid accesses and uninitialised reads count; "still reachable" is
what SDL and FreeType keep for the process lifetime and says nothing about
this library. The three suppressions in scripts/valgrind.supp are each a
decision that a finding belongs to somebody else.
Six defects, all filed in TODO.md under "Memory checking", the first of
which is the one that matters: not one of the four json_load_file calls in
src/ is ever matched by a json_decref, so every asset load abandons its
parsed document -- 1.5 KB per sprite, 2.1 KB per character, 9 KB per load of
the 2x2 fixture map, and on the order of a megabyte for a real one. A game
that reloads a level on death leaks a level's worth of JSON every time.
akgl_get_property also reads up to 4 KiB past the end of every property
value it copies, and the savegame name tables read past the end of every
registry key and write what they find into the file.
tests/util.c zeroes three fixtures it used to leave as stack garbage. The
library was never at fault there -- the tests handed it uninitialised floats
and then made one real call with them -- but sixteen findings of noise in a
new gate is how a gate gets ignored.
The unit suites' TIMEOUT goes from 30 to 300 because CTest applies the same
property to the checked run, where everything is twenty times slower.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
