Valgrind

This walks you through Valgrind's suite of memory and profiling tools. Memcheck catches heap corruption, use-after-free, and leaks with full stack traces. Cachegrind simulates cache behavior, Callgrind builds call graphs for KCachegrind, and Massif tracks heap growth over time. The guide covers compilation flags, interpreting output, writing suppressions for third-party noise, and when to reach for ASan instead. Valgrind runs 10-50x slower than native, but it works without root access and catches errors that sanitizers miss. Good for CI pipelines and environments where you can't recompile with instrumentation.

skills.sh installs: 740
GitHub stars: 279
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add mohitmishra786/low-level-dev-skills --skill valgrind --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Valgrind

Purpose

Guide agents through Valgrind tools: Memcheck for memory errors, Cachegrind for cache simulation, Callgrind for call graphs, and Massif for heap profiling.

Triggers

"My program has a memory leak / use-after-free"
"I can't use ASan — can I use Valgrind instead?"
"How do I profile cache behaviour without perf?"
"How do I visualize call graphs with Callgrind?"
"How do I profile heap allocation patterns?"
"Valgrind reports errors in third-party code I can't fix"

Workflow

1. Memcheck — memory error detection

Compile with -g -O1 for best results. -O0 is also fine; avoid -O2+ which can produce false positives.

valgrind --tool=memcheck \
         --leak-check=full \
         --show-leak-kinds=all \
         --track-origins=yes \
         --error-exitcode=1 \
         ./prog [args]

Key flags:

SKILL.md on GitHub

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