How do I enable and use address sanitizer and thread sanitizer?

Address Sanitizer (ASan) and Thread Sanitizer (TSan) are powerful debugging tools in Swift that help to identify memory issues and data races in your code. Enabling these sanitizers can drastically improve your application's stability and performance by catching bugs during the development phase.

How to Enable Address Sanitizer and Thread Sanitizer in Xcode

To enable Address Sanitizer and Thread Sanitizer in Xcode, follow these steps:

  1. Open your project in Xcode.
  2. Click on your project in the Navigator.
  3. Select the target you want to configure.
  4. Go to the Build Settings tab.
  5. In the search bar, type "sanitizer" to quickly find the relevant settings.
  6. For Address Sanitizer, set the Address Sanitizer option to YES.
  7. For Thread Sanitizer, set the Thread Sanitizer option to YES.

Running Your Application with Sanitizers

After enabling the sanitizers, simply run your application. If there are any issues detected, you’ll see messages in the console, guiding you to the source of the problem.

Example Code

Here’s an example of how you might encounter and debug issues using Address Sanitizer:


Address Sanitizer Thread Sanitizer Swift Xcode Debugging Tools