sentry values: allow a little more space before and after each alloc, respecting maximum alignment requirement fill with magic numbers (helps catch buffer overflows and underflows, and the occasional 'wild' pointer).The desirable feature list should look familiar from dmalloc and electricfence, and the surprisingly excellent book Writing Solid Code: When all else fails, you can provide your own global operator new/delete and malloc/calloc/realloc overloads - how to do so will vary a bit depending on compiler and platform - and this will be a bit of an investment - but it may pay off over the long run. Valgrind is ridiculously flexible: I've debugged large server software with many heap issues using it. (Found out about Application Verifier when researching an earlier question about a heap corruption issue.) I've used BoundsChecker and Insure++ (mentioned in other answers) in the past too, although I was surprised how much functionality was in Application Verifier.Įlectric Fence (aka 'efence'), dmalloc, valgrind, and so forth are all worth mentioning, but most of these are much easier to get running under *nix than Windows. You can get both as a part of the Windows Driver Kit or the lighter Windows SDK. Application Verifier combined with Debugging Tools for Windows is an amazing setup.

Ollydbg linux