HACKER Q&A
📣 develatio

Why aren't there any tools that detect memory leaks in JavaScript (web)?


Why is it that Javascript (in the browser) doesn't have any tools that would allow developers to perform memory leaks detection? Chrome has a heap profiler that can take memory snapshots, but it feels nothing like tools like Valgrind.


  👤 petercooper Accepted Answer ✓

👤 kohlerm
Chrome devtools comes with memory analysis tools. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/memory-problems/a...

Some of these (heap dumps) can also be used with nodejs. That being said, from my experience most UI developers do not care much about memory leaks,most likely because the assumption is that a page is not long running enough that's it would matter.


👤 josephcsible
Unlike C, JavaScript is garbage collected, so the kinds of memory leaks that Valgrind detects in C don't even exist as a concept in JavaScript.