BSON_VALGRIND(3)

💅 NAME 💅

bson_valgrind — the way you use Valgrind to check for BSON data leaks, bestie 🕵️♀️✨

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okay so here's the tea. A stack-allocated bson_t comes with a lil internal buffer of its own 🎀 — it only heap-allocates extra storage when it actually needs to, and that depends on how big its data is. Which means... if you forget to call bson_destroy() on a stack-allocated bson_t, it might leak. Or it might not. 🙈 And valgrind might catch it. Or it might not. It's giving chaos, honestly.

So to catch all the potential BSON data leaks in your code, you gotta configure the BSON_MEMCHECK flag like this:

cmake -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="-DBSON_MEMCHECK -g" .

With this flag set, literally every single bson_t mallocs at least one byte 🔥 (yes, even the tiny ones). So then you run your program's unittests with valgrind and verify that all your bson_t structs got destroyed. No stragglers. No survivors. Periodt. 💀

And one more thing bestie — set the environment variable MONGOC_TEST_VALGRIND to on so you skip the timing-dependent tests that are known to fail with valgrind. Those tests are not the vibe under valgrind, trust. 🫶

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✨ AUTHOR ✨

MongoDB, Inc 👑

🌸 COPYRIGHT 🌸

2017-present, MongoDB, Inc

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and that's the whole page, my love 💖 this was libbson version 1.23.1, dated Apr 27, 2026 — go forth and destroy your bson_ts, mwah 🎀✨