Finding Memory Leaks in the Ruby Ecosystem

This blog post is adapted from a talk that Adam Hess and I gave at RubyKaigi 2024. Until recently, Ruby lacked a mechanism for detecting native-level memory leaks from within Ruby and native gems. This was because, when Ruby terminates, it does not free the objects that are still alive or the memory used by Ruby’s virtual machine. This is because the system will reclaim all the memory used anyway,

[YassLab]

“Another limitation of ruby_memcheck is that it is limited to Linux systems since Valgrind only runs on Linux. This means that we cannot use a faster memory checker like Google’s sanitizers or support other operating systems such as using the macOS leaks tool.”

[diveintounlimit]

これは大変だ