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The advantage of ASAN compared to other similar tools such as Valgrind is that it's fast, and well supported.  This is also why it's the primary mechanism of detecting leaks for the communities that manage both Chrome and Firefox.   For more information on ASAN (and other sanitizer) basics and motivations check out this talk.

GCC versus Clang

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The capabilities of ASAN are similar whether the compiler used is clang or g++, as long as you're using very recent version of the compilers.  There's a good comparison of clang versus gcc7, in terms of ASAN capabilities, here.  With MXNet we've tested various versions of compilers and found that clang does not work well with our library.  We haven't completely tracked down the issue, but trying various methods of enabling ASAN has not worked for us when using clang, including forcing clang to dynamically link the ASAN library.  Luckily GCC ASAN seems to work correctly, and GCC 8 has the ASAN capabilities that we'd like to use.  Because of this we recommend using GCC 8 w/ ASAN when attempting to detect leaks or buffer overflows in MXNet, and we use GCC8 in CI and the Dockerfiles referred to below.

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