> memory leaks. It's surprisingly hard to find an easy to use memory leak detection tool.
I can vouch for heaptrack[1] nowadays, although it's pretty much Linux only. It's under the umbrella of KDE, but a heaptrack trace only requires a CLI app, and there is a nice Qt viewer to analyse the memory consumption.
It tracks the memory utilization at the level of malloc'd/free'd bytes. It's fine if your memory leak or other memory utilization problem is on this level. Recently I dealt with an issue, where increasing memory utilization was caused by fragmentation within the allocator. This didn't show up in heaptrack as an increasing memory utilization, but heaptrack still pointed out where most of the temporary allocations happened, leading to the culprit of the fragmentation.
Could you compare/contrast its functionality to https://github.com/KDE/heaptrack ?
In case someone is looking for the equivalent on Linux and Mac, there is HeapTrack
https://github.com/KDE/heaptrack
edit: typo