[FEATURE] add AddressSanitizer as an option

[yunwei37]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

AddressSanitizer is a fast memory error detector. It consists of a compiler instrumentation module and a run-time library. see https://github.com/google/sanitizers/wiki/AddressSanitizer. The tool can detect the following types of bugs:

• Out-of-bounds accesses to heap, stack and globals
• Use-after-free
• Use-after-return (clang flag -fsanitize-address-use-after-return=(never|runtime|always) default: runtime)
• Enable with: ASAN_OPTIONS=detect_stack_use_after_return=1 (already enabled on Linux).
• Disable with: ASAN_OPTIONS=detect_stack_use_after_return=0.
• Use-after-scope (clang flag -fsanitize-address-use-after-scope)
• Double-free, invalid free
• Memory leaks (experimental)

This tool is very fast. The average slowdown of the instrumented program is ~2x (see

And I think it's quite useful in C/C++ projects. You can simply enable it by compiling and linking your program with -fsanitize=address flag.

Describe the solution you'd like

Maybe we can add it as an option in cmake/StandardSettings.cmake ?

For example, like this:

option(${PROJECT_NAME}_ENABLE_ASAN "Enable Address Sanitize to detect memory error." ON)
if(${PROJECT_NAME}_ENABLE_ASAN)
  add_compile_options(-fsanitize=address)
  add_link_options(-fsanitize=address)
endif()

[filipdutescu]

That sounds great! Thanks for submitting the PR and hope we merge it ASAP 😁