Safe Manual Memory Management

The authors present HeapSafe, a tool that uses reference counting to dynamically verify the soundness of manual memory management of C programs. HeapSafe relies on a simple extension to the usual malloc/free memory management API: delayed free scopes during which otherwise dangling references can exist. Porting programs for use with HeapSafe typically requires little effort (on average 0.6% of lines change), adds an average 11% time overhead (84% in the worst case), and increases space usage by an average of 13%.