AddressSanitizer on Windows

Clang-tidy is the go-to assistant for most C++ programmers looking to improve their code, whether to modernize it or to find hidden bugs with its built-in checks. Static analysis is great, but you also get tons of false positives.

Now that you’re hooked on smart tools, you have to try dynamic/runtime analysis. After years of improvements and successes for Clang and GCC users, LLVM AddressSanitizer (ASan) is finally available on Windows, in the latest Visual Studio 2019 versions. Let’s find out how this experience is for MSVC projects.

We’ll see how AddressSanitizer works behind the scenes (compiler and ASan runtime) and analyze the instrumentation impact, both in perf and memory footprint. We’ll examine a handful of examples diagnosed by ASan and see how easy it is to read memory snapshots in Visual Studio, to pinpoint the failure.

Want to unleash the memory vulnerability beast? Put your test units on steroids, by spinning fuzzing jobs with ASan in Azure, leveraging the power of the Cloud from the comfort of your Visual Studio IDE.