Sanitizers (refer to https://github.com/google/sanitizers) have become incredibly useful tools for static and dynamic code analysis. By simply recompiling your code with the appropriate flags and linking against the necessary libraries, you can investigate and debug problems related to memory errors (address sanitizer), uninitialized reads (memory sanitizer), thread safety (thread sanitizer), and undefined behavior (undefined behavior sanitizer). Compared to similar analysis tools, sanitizers typically introduce a much smaller performance penalty and tend to give more detailed information on the problems detected. The drawback is that your code, and possibly parts of your toolchain, need to be recompiled with the additional flags.

In this recipe, we will set up a project to compile code with the different sanitizers activated and show how to check that the correct compiler flags are available.