Lua Memory Validator Tutorial

This document is intended to augment the information in the Lua Memory Validator Help file. If you have not read the help file we encourage you to do so. Lua Memory Validator is a powerful and complex product, reading the help manual will help you use Lua Memory Validator more efficiently.

This tutorial describes how to use Lua Memory Validator to perform memory leak detection in a Lua application.

Lua is a garbage collected language. Memory leaks happen using garbage collected languages when references to objects that are no longer required are not released. The failure to release the reference prevents the garbage collector from correctly identifying the memory as garbage and thus prevents the memory from being collected.

This tutorial will show you how to use Lua Memory Validator to detect and analyse memory leaks in your Lua application using the supplied lmvExample.lua application to demonstrate a typical memory leak and the various facilities Lua Memory Validator provides you to aid you in the task of identifying and analysing a memory leak.

The tutorial is split into several sections:

• The example application.
• Launching the application.
• Introducing the data views.
• Detecting the memory leak.
• Fixing the memory leak.
• Checking the memory leak is fixed.

If you would like a tutorial on how to use Lua Memory Validator to perform a given task, we will be happy to provide a tutorial, just let us know what topics you need the tutorial to cover. Send your suggestions to support@softwareverify.com.