You can debug kallisto with gdb and valgrind even if you can't compile it on your machine.
In order to do this you need to download the Debuggable binary, which is found on this gist.
You also need to place the source code in the same directory as where you will be debugging
wget https://github.com/pachterlab/kallisto/archive/v0.42.4.tar.gz
tar xzvf v0.42.4.tar.gz